I 


V 


v^ 


(/ 


Books  in   General 
By  Solomon   Eagle 

[Second    Series] 


Alfred  •  A  •  Knopf 

New  York  Mcmxx 


COPYRIGHT,  1920,  BY 
ALFRED  A.  KNOPF,  Inc. 


PRINTED    IN    THE    UNITED    STATES    OP    AMERICA 


r, 


^11  b 


^  TO 

DONALD  MACAULAY 

in  the  hope  that 
^  meeting  in  these  and  similar  pages 

2^  so  many  of 

His  Brethren 

.r. 

^^  amongst  them  being 

■~>  Donne,  Herbert,  Traherne,  Sterne, 

Herrick,  Taylor,  Swift,  Hooker, 
Burnet,  Lewis  Carroll 

AND 

The  Venerable  Bede 

It  MAY  Occur  to  Him  to  Write 
A  Book  Himself 


^ 


273643 


Preface 

THESE  papers  are  selections  from  a  series 
contributed  weekly,  without  intermission, 
to  the  New  Statesman  since  April,  19 13. 
I  do  not  feel  that  the  responsibility  for  reprinting 
them  rests  on  my  shoulders;  I  trust  that  where  it 
does  rest  it  will  rest  lightly.  I  shall  have  done  all 
I  hope  to  do  if  I  have  produced  the  sort  of  book  that 
one  reads  in,  without  tedium,  for  ten  minutes  before 
one  goes  to  sleep. 

The  pseudonym  "  Solomon  Eagle,"  I  may  explain, 
is  not  intended  to  posit  any  claim  to  unusual  wisdom 
or  abnormally  keen  sight.  The  original  bearer  of 
the  name  was  a  poor  maniac  who,  during  the  Great 
Plague  of  London,  used  to  run  naked  through  the 
street,  with  a  pan  of  coals  of  fire  on  his  head,  cry- 
ing "  Repent,  repent." 

This  preface  was  written  for,  and  printed  in,  the 
first  series  of  these  reprints.  As  it  is  accurate  and 
I  have  nothing  to  add  to  it,  I  thought  it  would  do 
again  now.  S.  E. 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Arciiive 

in  2008  witii  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.arcliive.org/details/booksingeneralbyOOeagl 


Contents 

The  Descendants  of  Shakespeare,  ii 

The  Diary  of  Charles  Pooter,  17 

Thomas  Traherne,  23 

Scientific  Management  for  Pegasus,  29 

The  New  Browning  Poems,  35 

Pidgin-English  for  Germans,  40 

Signor  Marinetti's  Masterpiece,  44 

Fitzgerald's  Second  Thoughts,  48 

Property  in  Proper  Names,  53 

The  Inferior  Poems  of  Keats,  58 

One's  Favourite  Author  Defined,  62 

Swinburne's  Vocabulary,  66 

Blake  and  His  Myths,  69 

Mutual  Compliments,  75 

Invective,  77 

A  Picture  of  Chaos,  81 

Shelley's  Letters,  86 

On  Cleaning  Books,  90 

The  Essay  in  America,  95 

The  Prices  of  Restoration  Books,    loi 

The  Humours  of  Hymnology,  107 

A  Dreadful  Story,  in 

Dr.  Donne's  Tomb,  115 

Russian  Wit,  1 19 

The  Goncourt  Journal  in  English,  120 

Poland  and  Our  Poets,  126 


Contents 

Literature  and  the  Advertiser,   131 

Cobbett  as  Housekeeper,  134 

Autography,   138 

A  Forgotten  Carohne,  140 

The  Diarist  in  our  Midst,  145 

A  Parody  in  Slang,  150 

Dialect  in  Literature,  152 

Greene's  Groatsworth,  157 

James  Whitcomb  Riley,  163 

Edinburgh:     The  Missing  Monument,  169 

Verhaeren,  174 

A  Shakespeare  MS.?   177 

A  Seaside  Library,    180 

A  Voice   from  the   Past,    185 

Francis  Thompson's  Method,  191 

Tobacco,  194 

Charles  Churchill,  203 

Commonplace  Books,  207 

The  Songs  of  the  Trenches,  212 

The  Limits  of  Imitation,  218 

Mr.  Lloyd  George  as  a  Vers-Librist,  223 

William  Cartwright,  228 

On  Submitting  Manuscripts,  233 

Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Lord  Tennyson,  238 

The  Statistics  of  Genius,  244 

Coleridge  at  Table,  250 

Fragments  of  China,  254 

Rupert  Brooke  in  Retrospect,  256 

Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  Idyll,  262 

Fire  and  the  Heart  of  Man,  268 


Books  in  General 

[Second  Series] 


The  Descendants  of 
Shakespeare 

ON  April  23,  19 19  (Shakespeare's  birthday), 
I  looked  at  the  front  page  of  the  Daily 
News.  I  read  there  that  the  Italians 
had  decided  to  take  no  further  part  in  the  dis- 
cussions on  the  Adriatic  problem,  their  view  being 
formed;  I  learned,  also  that  the  Roumanians  had  in- 
vaded Hungary.  This  done  I  turned,  as  a  man  will, 
to  the  back  page,  which  was  covered  with  photo- 
graphs. There  were  photographs  of  aeroplanes, 
of  soldiers,  of  a  lord  and  his  son,  of  Count 
Brockdorff-Rantzau;  and  my  eye  roamed  over 
them,  until  it  was  suddenly  caught,  as  a  bird's 
by  a  snake,  by  two  bald  and  bearded  human 
heads  side  by  side.  "  On  the  left,"  I  read,  "  is  a 
photograph  of  Mr.  Alfred  Thomas  Shakespeare 
Hart,  of  Lichfield,  and  on  the  right  a  portrait  of 
Shakespeare,  whose  lineal  descendant  he  is.  The 
likeness  is  very  striking."  It  is  also  very  striking 
that  a  journalist  could  have  published  without  more 
comment  than  this  two  portraits  of  two  gentlemen 
of  whom  the  later  cannot  possibly  be  a  lineal  de- 
scendant of  Shakespeare,  and  the  earlier  is  most  un- 
likely to  be  Shakespeare  himself.  Any  likeness 
which  may  exist  between  the  two  busts  — -  and  it  is 

II 


Books  in  General 

true  that  Mr.  A,  T,  S.  Hart  has  a  bald  and  rounded 
forehead,  a  little  pointed  beard  and  an  expanse  of 
collar  which  vie  with  those  pertaining  to  the  Por- 
trait (of,  probably,  an  Italian)  — is  therefore  not 
important. 

Otherwise  it  would  be  very  interesting.  Even  the 
remotest  relative  of  Shakespeare  must  have  a  fasci- 
nation about  him:  doubly  strong,  if  we  could  feel 
sure  that  the  dramatist's  traits,  by  some  far-reach- 
ing Mendelian  sport,  had  been  repeated  in  him.  To 
the  lineal  descendants  or  collaterals  of  other  poets 
no  such  interest  seems  to  attach.  There  are  Cole- 
ridges  and  Wordsworths  in  plenty  fulfilling  various 
useful  functions,  but  their  names  give  us  only  a  mild 
thrill.  If  the  present  Lord  Byron  and  the  present 
Lord  Tennyson  were  walking  down  Bond  street  to- 
gether, the  public  would  be  no  more  excited  than 
they  are  when  the  Duke  of  Wellington  or  Lord  Nel- 
son writes  a  letter  to  the  Times  or  Mr.  Dickens, 
K.C.,  rises  in  the  Courts.  A  lineal  descendant  of 
Shakespeare  would  be  the  most  exciting  descendant 
on  earth,  more  to  be  envied  than  the  posterity  of 
Confucius  and  Mahomet,  each  still  greatly  honoured 
in  their  own  climes.  But  Mr.  Alfred  Thomas 
Shakespeare  Hart  is  not  a  lineal  descendant  of 
Shakespeare. 

Shakespeare  had  three  children,  Hamnet  (who 
died  young) ,  Judith  Quiney,  and  Susannah  Hall. 
Judith  had  three  children  who  died  young  and  with- 

12 


The  Descendants  of  Shakespeare 

out  issue.  Susannah,  wife  of  an  eminent  physician, 
and  hostess  (at  New  Place)  of  Queen  Henrietta 
Maria,  had  one  only  daughter,  Elizabeth.  Eliza- 
beth, Shakespeare's  solitary  grandchild,  married, 
first,  Thomas  Nash,  by  whom  she  had  no  children, 
and  then  (Sir)  John  Barnard  of  Abington  Manor, 
by  whom  also  she  had  no  children.  Lady  Barnard 
died  in  February,  1669— '70  and  she  was  the  last  of 
Shakespeare's  "  lineal  descendants."  The  family  of 
Hart  (to  which  I  presume  Mr.  Alfred  Thomas 
Shakespeare  Hart,  of  Lichfield,  belongs)  is  de- 
scended from  Shakespeare's  sister  Joan,  who  mar- 
ried a  Hart.  To  these  Harts  Lady  Barnard  be- 
queathed what  is  known  as  Shakespeare's  Birthplace, 
which  was  in  their  occupation  and  which  they  had 
turned  into  an  inn.  The  inn  existed  until  1846;  the 
Harts  sold  it  in  1806.  Sir  Sidney  Lee  quotes  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare  Hart  (1778-1834)  as  saying: 
"  My  grandfather  used  to  obtain  a  great  deal  of 
money  by  showing  the  premises  to  strangers  who 
used  to  visit  them."  There  are  advantages,  as  well 
as  lustre,  in  being  descended  from  Shakespeare's  sis- 
ter; but  it  is  not  the  same  thing  as  being  a  lineal 
descendant. 

The  last  lineal  descendant  to  be  discovered  by  the 
Press  was  announced  in  the  Morning  Post  ten  years 
ago.  He  was  Mr.  Charlemagne  K.  Hopper,  an 
American  then  staying  at  the  Carlton  Hotel.  His 
home  was  in  the  rising  town  of  Bismarckville,  Mo., 
where  he  dealt  in  "  wheat  both  white  and  red,  and  of 

13 


Books  in  General 

both  spring  and  autumn  varieties,  maize  or  Indian 
corn,  oats,  rye,  buckwheat  of  every  variety,  seed 
corn,  and  bearded  barley,"  and  he  had  "  the  entree 
to  the  most  exclusive  coteries  of  Albany  and  Buf- 
falo." Mr.  Hopper's  story  was  that  Lady  Barnard 
had  a  studiously  concealed,  illegitimate  daughter 
Anne,  who  was  ancestor  of  the  Pooke  family,  whose 
connection  with  Mr.  Hopper  had  been  traced  by 
"  Mr.  Cohen,  a  charming  and  cultivated  genealogist, 
whose  business  is  mainly  with  America  and  the  Colo- 
nies." The  last  of  the  Pookes  had,  it  seemed,  left 
a  daughter,  Cassiopeia,  who  married  the  Rev.  Mr. 
Aesop  Hopper,  a  minister  of  the  Hicksite  persuasion 
in  Cincinnati.  The  announcement  was  taken  seri- 
ously by  evening  papers,  who  sent  reporters  hur- 
riedly round  to  the  Carlton  Hotel  to  interview  the 
Cygnet  of  Avon.  But  Mr.  Hopper  was  merely  an 
invention  of  Mr.  Belloc's:  his  story  may  still  be  read 
in  the  volume  of  collected  essays  called  On  Every- 
thing. 

We  are  certain,  as  far  as  we  can  be  certain  of  any- 
thing of  this  sort,  that  Lady  Barnard  left  no  chil- 
dren and  no  descendants.  But  her  husband's  fam- 
ily is  still  going  strong,  and  there  is  at  least  one  liv- 
ing Barnard  who  has  contributed  to  the  Shakespeare 
discussion.  This  is  Mr.  Finch  Barnard,  who  pub- 
lished recently  a  booklet  which  he  called  Science  and 
the  Soul,  but  which  was  in  reality  chiefly  concerned 
with  the  genealogical  glories  of  his  family.  He,  as 
a  Barnard,  is  not  having  the  Baconian  theory;  but  he 
14 


The  Descendants  of  Shakespeare 

says  that  it  is  quite  obvious  that  Shakespeare  of 
Stratford  never  wrote  the  plays.  "  The  real  Wil- 
liam Shakespeare,"  he  says,  "  was  a  fast  declasse," 
and  he  seems  to  imagine  that  this  is  enough  ground 
for  saying  that  the  author  of  Shakespeare  was  one  of 
the  Barnards.  "  There  is  small  probability  of  a 
love  match,  and  it  is  possible  that  Sir  John  Barnard 
married  Shakespeare's  grand-daughter  for  his  sec- 
ond wife,  partly  in  order  to  acquire  the  different 
MSS.  of  which  the  actors  were  probably  allowed 
possession  for  stage  purposes."  The  suggestion  is 
that  Sir  John  destroyed  all  the  Shakespeare  manu- 
scripts, as  some  of  them  were  too  licentious  to  see 
the  light  of  day. 

Francis  Feeble  and  Barnardine  are  both  satires 
by  the  fast  declasse  of  his  relative  Francis  Barnard. 
Silence  and  Slender  "  owe  the  same  original  ";  "  the 
venom  of  the  Author  of  Shakespeare  sticks  at  noth- 
ing." It  will  have  been  deduced  by  now  that  Mr. 
Finch  Barnard  is  a  little  too  interested  in  his  family. 
How  interested  we  begin  to  realize  when  he  leaves 
Shakespeare  and  heads  a  chapter: 

"  Christianity  and  the  Barnards 

"  Some  Historical  and  Genealogical  Evidences 
of  the  Descent  of  the  Barnards  and  Finches  from 
Charlemagne  and  from  Adam." 

S.   Bernard  was  a  Barnard;  so  was  S,   Francis  of 

15 


Books  in  General 

Asslsi.  They  were  both  descended  from  the  Em- 
peror Charlemagne.  S.  Francis  "  was  in  his  youth 
a  leader  of  his  young  fellow  nobles  of  Assisi;  he 
turned  from  profligate  to  priest.  In  many  ways  a 
true  Barnard."  Charlemagne  came  from  Adam 
through  Askenaz,  a  German  giant: 

"  Askenaz  was  the  son  of  Gomer,  who  was  son  of 
Japhet,  eldest  son  of  Noah,  and  elder  branch  to  the 
Jews.  Aventinus,  however,  makes  Askenaz  a 
fourth  son  of  Noah.  This  great  family  was  rep- 
resented in  England  by  the  ancient  Barnard  and 
Finch  family." 

"  Where,"  proceeds  Mr.  Barnard,  "  would 
Shakespeare  or  any  other  of  our  literature  in  West- 
ern Europe  have  been  without  the  Barnards  and  the 
monasteries?  "  There  was  Charles  Martel,  there 
were  Roland  and  Oliver.  But,  examining  the  gene- 
alogy of  a  greater  still,  he  says: 

"  The  great  and  mystic  significance  attaches  to  the 
name  of  Barnard  in  regard  to  life  and  religion,  and 
the  mysterious  relations  between  spiritual  and  ani- 
mal  life.  .  .  .  There  is  not  only  a  spiritual  lien  and 
a  pedigreal  between  themselves,  but  probably  also  a 
blood,  as  well  as  a  spiritual,  tie  with  Jesus  Christ." 

This  is  the  sort  of  thing  that  happens  to  people  who 
are  too  enthusiastic  about  their  ancestors. 


i6 


The  Diary  of  Charles  Footer 

IN  an  outlandish  place  a  man,  who  had  recently 
seen  a  newspaper,  told  me  that  Mr.  Weedon 
Grossmith  was  dead.  I  had  as  I  frequently 
have,  The  Diary  of  a  Nobody  with  me;  and  I  have 
read  It  again  with  that  added  respect  that  one  has 
for  a  good  book  when  Its  author  Is  recently  dead;  for 
the  book  has  now,  at  this  latest  re-reading,  obviously 
survived  Its  author,  and  passed  one  more  mark  on  the 
road  towards  being  a  classic. 

One  frequently.  In  reviews  (though,  happily,  not 
so  frequently  as  one  did  ten  years  ago),  finds  a  book 
described  as  "  a  slice  of  life."  If  the  term  were  cor- 
rectly applied  It  would  be  all  very  well;  books  which 
accurately  reflect  dally  life  are  a  very  good  sort  of 
books.  But,  in  practice,  when  we  find  a  book  de- 
scribed as  "  a  slice  of  life  "  we  know  that  what  we 
are  to  expect  is  In  fact  something  far  other.  It  will 
be  a  novel  In  which,  probably,  great  care  will  have 
been  taken  about  the  representation  of  material  ob- 
jects and  of  character.  But  the  material  objects  will, 
usually,  be  grimy,  and  the  characters  will  Invariably 
be  weak.  Nobody  will  (although,  in  "real  life," 
people  often  do)  lead  a  happy  existence  or  even  die 
an  honourable  death.  Nobody  will  marry  the  per- 
son he  or  she  ought  to  marry,  nobody  will  have  the 

17 


Books  in  General 

strength  to  resist  any  temptation  or  to  dare  any  de- 
cisive action,  nobody  will  laugh  (save  bitterly),  no- 
body will  make  festival  or  feel  the  sun.  The  term 
"  a  slice  of  life  "  applied  to  a  book  certainly  advises 
us  that  we  need  not  fear  (if  we  are  disposed  to  fear) 
any  "  romantic  nonsense,"  but  it  also  promises  us 
that  we  shall  read  about  people  far  more  uniformly 
miserable  and  impotent  than  the  generality  of  men, 
and  that,  whatever  the  place  selected  for  the  termi- 
nation of  the  narrative,  it  shall  not  be  a  place  at 
which  the  outlook  of  any  of  the  principal  characters 
is  promising.  They  will  be  dead,  disgraced,  de- 
bauched and  dipsomaniac,  and  lucky  if  they  have 
avoided  suicide. 

Yet,  as  I  say,  the  term  has  been  perverted.  For 
myself,  I  should  be  far  more  inclined  to  apply  it  to 
The  Diary  of  a  Nobody  than  to  most  of  the  books 
that  are  usually  accorded  it.  This  work  was  written 
by  George  and  Weedon  Grossmith,  and  illustrated 
by  the  latter.  It  first  appeared  in  Punch  under  the 
editorship  of  Burnand  (who  suggested  its  title),  and 
was  expanded  before  republication  in  book  form. 
The  realist  may  complain  that  the  end  is  somewhat 
forced;  that  all  the  members  of  the  Footer  family 
are  left  too  simultaneously  fortunate.  But  I  do  not 
think  that  he  could  complain  of  anything  else;  unless 
of  that  faint  touch  of  caricature,  that  slight  height- 
ening, that  discreet  selection,  which  are  necessary  if 
we  are  to  reflect  the  actual  without  being  boring. 
The  book  purports  to  be  the  diary  of  Mr.  Charles 
i8i 


The  Diary  of  Charles  Footer 

Footer,  of  Brickfield  Terrace,  Holloway,  whose  am- 
bition is  realized  when  (half-way  through  the  book) 
he  becomes  a  senior  clerk  in  the  firm  of  Perkupp, 
which  he  has  faithfully  served  for  twenty-one  years. 
Diaries  by  more  important  persons  record  visits  to 
Windsor  and  troubles  in  the  Cabinet;  this  one  re- 
cords (and  the  events  were  as  important  to  the 
Footers  as  other  events  were  to  Lady  Euphemia  Re- 
gesan  or  Lord  Zox)  visits  to  Acton  and  Sutton  and 
troubles  with  the  laundress,  the  plumber  and  the 
butcher.  Around  Mr.  and  Mrs.  Charles  Footer 
circle  a  numerous  body:  their  son  Lupin  Footer, 
Mrs.  James  (of  Sutton),  Mr.  Franching  (of  Feck- 
ham),  Mr.  Gowing  (of  the  velveteen  jacket),  Mr. 
Cummings  (the  veteran  tricyclist).  Miss  Daisy  Mut- 
lar,  Mr.  Murray  Fosh  (of  Fosh's  hats),  Sarah  the 
housemaid,  and  others.  Their  actions  and  reactions 
are,  I  think,  far  more  faithfully  described  than  Zola 
would  have  described  them,  and  I  am  not  alone  in 
thinking  that  it  will  carry  the  name  of  Grossmith 
down  the  ages. 

The  Diary  of  a  Nobody  was  first  published  as  a 
book  in  1892.  There  were  two  subsequent  editions 
in  1894,  but  it  was  another  eleven  years  before  the 
fourth  edition  was  called  for  in  1905.  Five  more 
years,  and  in  19 10  Mr.  Arrowsmith  issued  a  pocket 
edition  with  re-engraved  drawings,  the  best  and  most 
portable  edition  to  possess.  The  sale  In  eighteen 
years  had  not  been  great,  but  the  publisher  had,  quite 
justifiably,  the  feeling  that  the  book's  audience  was  a 

19 


Books  in  General 

good  if  not  a  large  one,  and  that  time  would  widen 
it.  He  was  able  to  preface  to  the  19 lo  edition  let- 
ters from  Lord  Rosebery  and  Mr.  Birrell,  and  an 
extract  from  an  essay  by  Mr.  Belloc.  That  these 
three  all  happen  to  be  persons  in  whom  political  in- 
terests join  with  literary  is  a  coincidence;  the  book 
has  no  political  bearing  at  all,  though  sociologists  of 
a  remote  future  may  treat  it  as  a  document  (far 
more  accurate  because  less  lopsided  than,  say,  the 
novels  of  Gissing)  recording  what  London  lower- 
middle-class  life  was  like  in  the  eighteen-nineties. 
But  the  three  have  things  in  common  all  the  same. 
They  all  like,  and  practise,  irony;  each  admires,  and 
possesses,  a  clear  English  style;  each  is  superior  to 
the  contemporary  fashion  in  books  and  likes  things 
old  and  new;  and  each  has  shown  a  fondness  for  odd 
character. 

Lord  Rosebery  wrote  to  say  that  he  had  probably 
"  purchased  and  given  away  more  copies  than  any 
living  man."  The  book  was  so  familiar  to  him  that 
the  keen  edge  of  his  discrimination  had  worn  off  and 
he  was  incapable  of  a  reasoned  criticism  of  it. 
"  But,"  he  concluded,  "  I  regard  any  bedroom  I 
occupy  as  unfurnished  without  a  copy  of  it."  Mr. 
Birrell  said,  "  I  dare  not  tell  you  my  view  of  Charles 
Footer.  I  rank  him  with  Don  Quixote,  It  is  a 
matter  of  great  pride  with  me  and  all  in  this  house, 
that  our  name  is  borne  by  one  of  the  characters  in 
this  bit  of  immortality  —  by  an  illiterate  charwoman, 
it  is  true,  who  never  touched  a  book  —  but  what  of 
20 


The  Diary  of  Charles  Footer 

that?  I  am  there."  Mr,  Belloc's  tribute,  from  an 
essay  On  People  in  Books  (he  has  celebrated  the 
work  elsewhere,  as  also  that  neglected  modern 
classic.  The  IFallet  of  Kai  Lung) ,  is  noble: 

"  Take,  for  instance,  that  immoderately  common 
type,  among  the  most  common  of  God's  creatures, 
which  I  will  call  '  the  Silent  F'ool,'  the  man  who 
hardly  ever  talks,  and  when  he  does,  says  something 
so  overwhelmingly  silly  that  one  remembers  it  all 
one's  life.  I  can  recollect  but  one  Silent  Fool  in 
modern  letters,  but  he  comes  in  a  book  which  is  one 
of  the  half-dozen  immortal  achievements  of  our 
time,  a  book  like  a  decisive  battle,  or  like  the  statue 
of  John  the  Baptist  at  South  Kensington,  a  glory  for 
us  all.  I  mean  The  Diary  of  a  Nobody.  In  that 
you  will  find  the  silent  Mr.  Padge,  who  says  '  That's 
right '  —  and  nothing  more." 

Mr.  Belloc's  statement  is  not  quite  literally  true, 
I  think.  On  the  first  and  most  important  occasion, 
when  he  occupied  (and  refused  to  leave  even  when 
tempted  by  food)  the  best  arm-chair,  Mr.  Padge  did 
certainly  contribute  nothing  to  the  conversation  save 
an  infrequent  (but,  I  contend,  always  apt  and  rele- 
vant) "  That's  right."  But  we  have  just  one  more 
example  of  his  speech.  Mr.  Belloc  forgot  Mr. 
Padge's  reappearance  at  the  East  Acton  Volunteer 
Ball: 

"  I  assisted  Carrie  and  her  newly-formed  acquaint- 
ance, who  said  her  name  was  Lupkin,  to  some  cham- 

21 


Books  in  General 

pagne;  also  myself,  and  handed  the  bottle  to  Mr. 
Padge  to  do  likewise,  saying,  '  You  must  look  after 
yourself.'  He  replied:  '  That's  right,'  and  poured 
out  half  a  tumbler  and  drank  Carrie's  health,  as  he 
said,  '  with  her  worthy  lord  and  master.'  " 

"  We  had,"  adds  Mr.  Footer,  "  some  splendid 
pigeon-pie,  and  ices  to  follow."  But  poor  Mr. 
Footer!  He  thought  the  refreshments  were  all  a 
part  of  the  show  to  which  he  had  been  invited. 
They  were  not.  They  were  extras.  The  waiter 
presented  him  with  a  bill  for  £3  os.  6d.  (including 
sixpence  for  a  cigar  for  Mr.  Fadge),  which  he  could 
not  quite  meet;  and  his  taking  a  cab  without  any 
money  resulted  in  a  row  with  the  cabman  and  a  long, 
dreary  trudge.  "  We  had  to  walk  home  in  the  pour- 
ing rain,  nearly  two  miles,  and  when  I  got  in  I  put 
down  the  conversation  I  had  with  the  cabman,  word 
for  word,  as  I  intend  writing  to  the  Telegraph  for 
the  purpose  of  proposing  that  cabs  should  only  be 
driven  by  men  under  government  control,  to  prevent 
civilians  being  subjected  to  the  disgraceful  insult 
and  outrage  that  I  had  had  to  endure."  Is  that  not 
a  typical  slice  of  life? 


22 


Thomas  Traherne 

A  BORROWED  house.  Sun  all  day.  The 
first  sulphur  butterflies  on  the  first  flow- 
ers. I  have  not  read  anything  for  several 
days.  I  have  talked  no  word  about  literature,  its 
present  position  and  future  prospects.  For  all  I 
have  heard  to  the  contrary,  the  whole  body  of  Brit- 
ish authors  has  suddenly  been  wiped  out  by  a  plague 
—  which  should  certainly  work  to  the  advantage  of 
the  single  survivor,  who  has  long  stood  in  need  of  a 
real  opportunity.  Anyhow,  what  with  one  thing 
and  another,  the  usually  teeming  brain  was  not  teem- 
ing at  all.  So  in  I  went  to  see  what  I  could  find.  I 
came  out  with  a  beautiful  large  white  mock-vellum 
copy  of  the  late  Mr.  Dobell's  The  Poetical  Works 
of  Thomas  Traherne,  B.D.,  1636  ( ?)-i 674.  It 
is  some  time  since  I  read  that  strangely  resurrected 
man.  I  thought  I  would  have  another  look  at  him; 
or,  in  more  professional  language,  revise  my  esti- 
mate. 

There  is,  however,  many  a  slip.  No  sooner  had 
I  sat  down  than  I  perceived  that  the  owner,  who  had 
presumably  possessed  the  book  since  1903,  had  not 
cut  the  pages.  And  these  were  no  ordinary  pages. 
They  were  made  of  incredibly  stout  paper  —  incred- 
ible, that  is,  in  these  days.     Tops  and  sides,  they 

23 


Books  in  General 

were  as  firm  as  rocks.  And  I  have  no  knife.  No 
doubt  somewhere  on  the  premises  there  was  a  bas- 
ket full  of  knives.  There  always  is;  but  "some- 
where "  is  not  the  same  thing  as  here.  Oh,  why, 
why  do  they  sell  books  like  this?  There  are 
books  whose  pages  you  can  open  with  a  match, 
replacing  the  match,  when  broken,  with  a  new 
one.  This  was  not  one  of  them;  and  in  any  case 
the  pages  were  not  likely  to  have  become  so  rec- 
onciled to  the  use  of  substitutes  as  to  yield  good- 
humouredly  to  the  broad,  smooth  beam  of  a  patent 
benzine  lighter.  Hairpins,  when  accessible,  have 
been  known  to  do  good  work;  but  I  don't  see  a  hair- 
pin getting  through  these.  My  thumb,  if  employed 
as  it  has  so  often  been,  would  simply  tear  these  pages 
out  by  the  roots,  and  probably  make  many  of  them 
difficult  to  read;  even  my  little  finger,  lean  as  it  is  on 
the  rations,  would  be  useless.  Old  letters?  These 
pages  laugh  at  them.  A  pocket  of  postcards  would 
go  nowhere ;  one  edge  would  turn  the  sharpest  cut- 
ting blade  that  serviceable  postcard  e'er  displayed. 
It  certainly  ought  to  be  stopped.  At  the  very  least 
the  top  edges  should  be  cut  and  gilt.  If  there  be  an 
advantage  —  and  I  admit  the  charm  once  the  job  is 
done  —  to  have  rough  edges,  let  the  manufacturers 
do  the  extra  work  needed.  To  sell  the  public  an  un- 
opened book  is  to  sell  them  a  half-manufactured  ar- 
ticle. You  might  as  well  sell  them  envelopes  with- 
out any  gum  on  them.  If  publishers  ever  go  into 
bookshops  to  buy  —  I  have  no  evidence  that  they 
do  —  has  it  never  occurred  to  them  that  other  cus- 

24 


Thomas  Traherne 

tomers'  behaviour  is  precisely  like  their  own?  Are 
they  incapable  of  generalizing  that  they  should  have 
failed  to  realize  that  a  man  who  picks  up  an  un- 
opened book  by  an  unfamiliar  author  tends  —  even 
when  he  is  at  liberty  to  slit  the  leaves  —  to  look  only 
at  the  few  pages  that  are  completely  exposed,  and  to 
give  the  sheltered  pages,  at  the  most,  one  or  two  ob- 
lique squints?  How  many  masterpieces  have  I  ig- 
nored because  of  this  vile  practice  of  publishing 
books  in  locked  chests  that  have  to  be  burst  open ! 
How  often  have  the  really  great  passages  of  a  book 
I  have  handled  been  hermetically  sealed  whilst  I  have 
misjudged  the  author  by  more  accessible  banalities! 

But  at  last  Ingenuity  and  hard  work  laid  Traherne 
bare  before  me.  I  found  that  my  previous  opinion 
that  Traherne  was,  as  a  rule,  too  awkward,  too  dull, 
and  too  monotonous  to  be  placed  anywhere  near  Cra- 
shaw  and  Vaughan  was  an  opinion  I  am  not  likely 
to  abandon.  More;  I  think  the  fact  that  the  claim 
was  made  for  him  when  Mr.  Dobell  first  published 
those  two-hundred-years-lost  manuscripts  has  prob- 
ably led  many  to  give  him  less  than  his  due.  For  a 
great  part  of  him  is  repetitive;  his  imagery  is  seldom 
rich;  his  language  is  usually  abstract  and  diffuse;  and 
his  best  things  have  to  be  looked  for.  The  glory  of 
God  was  his  object;  he  kept  his  eye  too  directly  and 
exclusively  on  the  object  for  a  man  who  writes  a 
large  number  of  poems.  Much  of  his  work  is  little 
more  than  versified  prose,  prose  like  that  of  Felt- 
ham's  Resolves  or  his  own,  often  most  moving  and 

25 


Books  in  General 

eloquent,  Centuries  of  Meditations.  And  the  life 
has  gone  out  of  the  prose;  never  do  you  get  anything 
so  "  atmospheric  "  and  so  touching  as  those  recol- 
lections in  the  Centuries,  such  as  that  on  his  young 
innocence,  which  opens: 

"  The  corn  was  orient  and  immortal  wheat  which 
never  should  be  reaped  nor  was  ever  sown.  I 
thought  it  had  stood  from  everlasting  to  everlasting. 
The  dust  and  stones  of  the  street  were  as  precious 
as  gold:  the  gates  were  at  first  the  end  of  the  world. 
The  green  trees,  when  I  saw  them  first  through  one 
of  the  gates,  transported  and  ravished  me;  their 
sweetness  and  unusual  beauty  made  my  heart  to  leap, 
and  almost  mad  with  ecstasy,  they  were  such  strange 
and  wonderful  things.  The  Men!  O  what  ven- 
erable and  reverend  creatures  did  the  aged  seem! 
Immortal  Cherubims!  And  young  men  glittering 
and  sparkling  angels,  and  maids  strange  seraphic 
creatures  of  life  and  beauty!  Boys  and  girls  tumb- 
ling in  the  street  were  moving  jewels :  I  knew  not 
that  they  were  born  or  should  die.  But  all  things 
abided  eternally  as  they  were  in  their  proper  places. 
Eternity  was  manifest  in  the  Light  of  the  Day,  and 
something  infinite  behind  everything  appeared,  which 
.  talked  with  my  expectation  and  moved  my  desire. 
The  City  seemed  to  stand  in  Eden  or  to  be  built  in 
Heaven.  The  streets  were  mine,  the  temple  was 
mine,  the  people  were  mine,  their  clothes  and  gold 
and  silver  were  mine,  as  much  as  their  sparkling  eyes, 
fair  skins,  and  ruddy  faces.  The  skies  were  mine, 
26 


Thomas  Traherne 

and  so  were  the  sun  and  moon  and  stars,  and  all  the 
world  was  mine;  and  I  the  only  spectator  and  en- 
joyer  of  it.  I  knew  no  churlish  proprieties,  nor 
bounds  nor  division,  but  all  proprieties  and  divisions 
were  mine,  all  treasures  and  the  possessors  of  them. 
So  that  with  much  ado  I  was  corrupted,  and  made  to 
learn  the  dirty  devices  of  this  world,  which  now  I 
unlearn,  and  become,  as  it  were,  a  little  child  again 
that  I  may  enter  into  the  Kingdom  of  God." 

It  is  strange  that  neither  his  editor  nor  Traherne 
himself  should  have  perceived  that  it  was  sheer  anti- 
climax to  follow  this  beautiful,  this  sounding  and  af- 
fecting prose  with  a  poem  "  based  on  it  "  like  The 
Approach: 

"  O  Lord,  I  wonder  at  Thy  Love, 

Which  did  my  Infancy  so  early  move, 

But  more  at  that  which  did  forbear, 

And  move  so  long,  tho'  slighted  many  a  year; 

But  most  of  all,  and  last  that  Thou 

Thyself  shouldst  me  convert,  I  scarce  know  how. 

Thy  Gracious  Motions  oft  in  vain 
Assaulted  me:  my  Heart  did  hard  remain 
Long  time:  I  sent  my  God  away, 
Grieved  much  that  He  could  not  impart  His  joy. 
I  careless  was,  nor  did  regard 

The  End  for  which  He   all   those    Thoughts   pre- 
pared." 


27 


Books  in  General 

The  life,  the  music,  the  colour,  the  communicated 
emotion  even,  have  gone  during  the  effort  to  write 
foot-rule  rhymed  verse,  for  which  Traherne  had  little 
gift.  He  was  a  saint,  he  was  sensitive,  he  loved 
beauty,  he  had  a  fine  intellect  and  a  natural  gift  of 
language;  so  that  accidental  great  things  were 
bound  to  appear  in  his  poems.  But  I  would  give  al- 
most all  of  them  for  a  few  pages  of  his  prose  or  of 
that  strange  poetical  prose  of  the  Christian  Ethics, 
which  in  places,  as  Mr.  Dobell  observes,  startlingly 
anticipates  Whitman  both  in  manner  and  matter  — 
which  we  should  not  have  expected  a  Caroline  cler- 
gyman to  do.  Christian  Ethics  is  one  of  the  rarest 
of  seventeenth-century  books.  Why  does  not  some 
one  reprint  it? 


28 


Scientific  Management  for 
Pegasus 

IT  was  very  kind  of  a  friend  to  send  me  a  copy 
of  The  Editor,  an  American  "  Journal  of  In- 
formation for  Literary  Workers."  It  is  pub- 
lished at  Ridgewood,  New  Jersey,  and  it  is  ap- 
parently of  respectable  age.  But  I  had  never  seen 
a  copy  before,  and  I  am  sorry  I  hadn't.  It  is  a  per- 
fectly serious  trade  journal.  It  caters  for  manufac- 
turers of  literature,  just  as  the  Iron  and  Steel  Trades 
Journal  and  The  Undertaker's  Journal  do  for  iron- 
masters and  interment  experts. 

The  first  article  contains  advice  to  poetical  begin- 
ners. It  is  by  Ella  Randall  Pearce,  who  describes 
herself  as  "  a  versifier  of  many  seasons,  with  enough 
acceptances  on  record  to  soothe  the  hurt  of  un- 
counted rejection  slips."  She  has  "  learned  the  re- 
quirements of  many  of  these  publishing  houses,"  and 
has  "  trained  the  Muse  to  feed  on  ginger-snaps  oc- 
casionally instead  of  angel-food  and  ambrosia"; 
and  she  has  found  the  composition  of  four-line  verses 
for  post-cards  "  a  pleasant  and  profitable  side-line." 
She  gives  several  useful  tips.  "  Rules  of  rhyme 
and  metre  "  must  be  observed;  but  "  even  the  tender 
addresses    to    '  Mother,'    '  Father,'    '  Dear   Wife,' 

29 


Books  in  General 

'  Friend   o'    Mine,'    etc.,    should   carry    a    cheerful, 
heart-warming  quality." 

"Another  editorial  warning  is  this:  'Nothing 
trite.'  What  can  poet  say  that  poet  has  not  said 
before?  Nothing,  perhaps;  but  one  must  find  a 
fairly  new  way  of  saying  it  to  draw  the  pay  checks. 
One  dollar  for  a  four-line  verse  seems  to  be  the  usual 
payment;  although  a  few  publishing  houses  pay 
more,  and  some  —  may  they  live  to  repent!  —  pay 
less.  Especially  clever  ideas  sometimes  bring 
higher  prices.  I  have  received  two  dollars  each  for 
couplets  or  short  prose  sentiments,  and  five  dollars 
for  verses  of  six  or  eight  lines;  and  I  have  also  ac- 
cepted a  check  for  ten  dollars  for  tAvo  dozen  miscel- 
laneous sentiments  from  a  publisher  who  buys  them 
in  dozens  when  he  buys  at  all." 

The  principle  of  the  magazine  is  that  the  successes 
of  the  trade  should  give  their  juniors  the  benefit  of 
their  experience.  After  an  article  by  a  magazine 
photograph  expert,  who  says  that  last  summer  he 
"  made  some  comic  insect  pictures  "  which  interested 
the  editor  of  Photo-Era,  we  come  to  Helen  B.  John- 
son on  "  Genius  and  the  Market."  This  lady  says 
that  when  the  inspiration  is  on  you,  you  must  write 
without  thinking  of  the  market: 

"  Forget  there  is  a  market.  Never  mind  what 
the  editor  wants.  Forget  him!  If  grammar 
bothers  you,  forget  it!      Rhetoric,  grammar,  syntax, 

30 


Scientific  Management  for  Pegasus 

spelling,  punctuation  —  push  them  all  in  the  back- 
ground and  let  them  take  care  of  themselves. 
Make  way  for  the  king.  Just  let  the  king  rule,  and 
be  as  lawless  about  it  as  you  are  inspired  to  be.  Get 
the  idea,  while  it  is  on  the  wing,  and  capture  it  with 
your  individuality.  When  the  blood  is  cool  again, 
the  heart  and  mind  in  harmonious  vibration,  delib- 
erately turn  your  coat  and  make  your  obeisance  to 
king  market." 

And  you  should  always  have  several  inspirations  in 
progress  at  once : 

"  Did  you  ever  make  a  dish  of  pop-corn?  You 
never  did  by  popping  one  at  a  time.  The  best  way 
is  to  put  in  a  handful  and  keep  it  circulating  over  a 
hot  fire.  Then  the  corn  pops.  Now,  get  more  than 
one  idea  into  your  popper,  and  be  sure  they  have  as 
much  life  in  them  as  each  kernel  of  corn.  Keep 
them  circulating  in  the  hotbed  of  the  market,  and 
they  will  pop — checks  your  way." 

There  follows  "  Arriving:  How  These  Writers  Did 
It  " ;  a  "  symposium,"  as  some  call  it,  or  "  a  round 
table  story-fest,"  as  it  is  called  here,  of  the  members 
of  the  Missouri  Writers'  Guild.  Maude  Radford 
Warren  says:  "  For  several  years  I  had  been  writ- 
ing Henry  James  things  for  which  there  seemed  to 
be  no  market."  Being  short  of  money  when  "  down 
town  "  once,  she  went  into  a  cheap  restaurant : 


31 


Books  in  General 

"  That  was  the  first  time  I  had  ever  come  in  con- 
tact with  the  '  people,'  as  I  had  always  lived  in  a  uni- 
versity atmosphere.  They  interested  me  wonder- 
fully, and  the  result  was  The  Wearing  of  the 
Green.*' 

Randall  Parrish  says  he  sold  his  first  book  for 
$3000,  at  the  age  of  forty-three.  "  I  went  into  the 
writing  game  in  the  cold-blooded  way  I  would  start 
in  any  business,"  continued  Mr.  Parrish.  "  I  do  not 
try  to  write  literature;  I  write  books  to  sell."  And 
Mr.  William  H.  Hamby,  "  one  of  Missouri's  most 
prolific  writers,"  says  that  the  first  sum  he  earned  by 
his  pen  was  $1.50  for  an  article  on  "  How  to 
Write." 

"  I  thought  it  was  worth  more,  but  I  was  glad  to 
get  that,  and  bought  a  red  tie  and  some  silk  socks 
with  the  money." 

Whereafter,  a  somewhat  soberer  article  on  "  For- 
eign Local  Colour." 

An  "  Open  Letter  to  Authors,"  by  Frank  R. 
Adams,  begins: 

"Fellows: — Do  you  ever  find  yourself,  as  I  often 
find  myself,  high  and  dry,  with  lots  of  time  to  write, 
and  not  a  plot  in  the  locker?  If  you  do,  read  on. 
Otherwise  turn  to  the  automobile  advertisements. 
This  is  not  for  you." 
32 


Scientific  Management  for  Pegasus 

The  remedy  Is  a  note-book,  in  which  plots  should  be 
jotted  down: 

"  When  I  am  absolutely  stuck  for  an  idea  and  the 
groceryman  is  beginning  to  think  he  is  stuck  for  my 
last  month's  bill,  I  turn  desperately  to  my  dog-eared 
vest-pocket  memoranda." 

Once  the  plot  has  been  fixed: 

"  The  rest  is  mere  machine  work  of  course.  I 
write  my  story  or  article,  as  the  case  may  be,  and 
then  after  lunch  take  my  wife  for  a  ride  in  our  1910 
caracole." 

Nellie  B.  Mace  is  more  idealistic.  "  Writing,  as  a 
vocation,  had  not  possessed  my  plans  .  i  .  until 
four  years  ago,  when,  by  a  happy  leading,  an  oppor- 
tunity was  opened  to  me  to  do  regular  work  in  one  of 
the  departments  of  a  certain  widely-circulated  publi- 
cation." She  finds  that  "  writing  pays,"  and  al- 
though "  I  do  not  aspire  to  hang  in  the  hall  of 
fame,"  the  gratitude  of  readers  whose  troubles  have 
been  assuaged  by  her  is  additional  payment.  "  The 
Plot  and  Idea  Forum  "  is  followed  by  "  The  Liter- 
ary Market,"  in  which  "  Wants  "  are  given  public- 
ity, the  things  required  ranging  from  "  sermonettes  " 
to  "  Jewish  juvenile  plays."  The  editor  of  a  paper 
at  Salem,  Mass.,  writes: 

"  We  could  use  a  good  political  story  if  we  could 

33 


Books  in  General 

get  one  that  has  something  in  it  besides  a  paving 
graft  expose  in  which  the  political  boss  tries  to  use 
his  beautiful  daughter  as  a  lever  to  pry  the  young 
mayor  or  the  young  newspaper  editor  from  the 
straight  and  narrow." 

And,  finally,  there  is  "  The  Experience  Exchange," 
in  which  readers  give  information  about  editors  and 
papers,  such  as  "  Miss  Fassett,  of  The  Woman's- 
World,  is  one  of  the  most  courteous  of  editors;  it 
pays  to  cultivate  her  acquaintance,"  and  "  The  man- 
aging editor  of  Today's,  Miss  Eberle,  is  very  cour- 
teous and  writes  nice  letters  of  criticism.  Quite  a 
welcome  change  from  the  last  incumbent." 

Amongst  the  books  advertised  at  the  end  are 
Points  About  Poetry,  by  Donald  G.  French;  looi 
Places  to  Sell  Manuscripts;  and  The  Fiction  Factory, 
by  John  Milton  Edwards,  who  has  "  made  more 
than  $1,000,000.00  with  a  typewriting  machine  and  a 
thinking  apparatus."  I  am  informed  that  a  recent 
issue  contained  an  article  on  "  Hymn  Writing  as  a 
Side-line." 

The  above  is  all  true. 


34 


The  New  Browning  Poems 

SIR  FREDERIC  KENYON  has  edited  a 
whole  volume  of  New  Poems  by  Robert  and 
Elizabeth  Barrett  Browning.  Ten  of  the 
"  new  "  poems  Included  appeared  in  the  Centenary 
Edition  of  Robert  Browning,  but  there  are  nineteen 
others  by  him  that  have  never  before  appeared  in  a 
collected  edition,  and  six  by  Mrs.  Browning.  Many 
of  these  were  found  amongst  the  MSS.  dispersed  at 
the  recent  Browning  sale.  Sir  Frederic  naturally 
feels  some  compunction  about  publishing  poems  that 
their  authors  refrained  from  putting  into  their 
books.      "  One  might  wish,"  he  says, 

"  that  the  unpublished  verses  of  both  poets  had  been 
destroyed  by  them  out  of  hand  when  once  the  deci- 
sion had  been  taken  not  to  publish  them.  Such 
waifs  and  strays  are  a  permanent  difficulty  to  ed- 
itors. If  the  author  is  sufficiently  eminent,  publica- 
tion of  everything  of  his  that  remains  above  ground 
is  eventually  inevitable,  and  an  editor  is  torn  between 
the  natural  desire  to  make  his  edition  complete,  and 
his  equally  natural  reluctance  to  print  matter  which  is 
not  worthy  of  its  author,  and  which  the  author  him- 
self did  not  consider  worthy  of  pubHcation.  The 
ultimate  solution  is  probably  some  limbo  of  an  ap- 

35 


Books  in  General 

pendix,  which  can  be  searched  once  for  all  by  the 
curious  and  then  left  to  its  obscurity." 

This  is  sound  enough  theory;  but  here  we  have  the 
volume  in  the  familiar  dark  mud-coloured  binding 
(I  speak  descriptively  and  not  at  all  derisively)  of 
the  old  Collected  Edition.  And  very  few  of  the 
new  poems  are  better  saved  than  lost. 

There  is  a  certain  interest  about  The  First  Born 
of  Egypt  —  astonishing  blank  verse  for  a  boy  of 
thirteen;  Helen's  Tower  is  a  tolerable  sonnet  which 
might  be  by  any  one;  and  the  unfinished  fragment, 
yEschylus'  Soliloquy,  is  really  fine.  It  is  the  day  of 
i^schylus'  death  "  at  the  hands  of  a  tortoise 
dropped  by  an  eagle,"  as  the  schoolboy  put  it.  He 
sits,  "  an  old  and  solitary  man,"  on  a  Sicilian  plain, 
hoping  to  evade  the  death  by  something  falling  from 
above  that  had  been  predicted  for  him.  He  hears 
the  life  of  men  in  the  distance  like  the  droning  of  a 
bee  at  sunset: 

Ay,  and  that  bee's  hum. 
The  buzzing  fly  and  mouthing  of  the  grass 
Cropped  slowly  near  me  by  some  straying  sheep 
Are  strange  to  me  with  life  —  and  separate  from  me 
The  outside  of  my  being  —  /  myself 
Grow  to  silence,  fasten  to  the  calm 
Of  inorganic  nature   .   .   .  sky  and  rocks  — 
/  shall  pass  on  into  their  unity  ' 

JVhen  dying  down  into  impersonal  dusk. 
36 


The  New  Browning  Poems 

Ahy  ha  —  these  flats  are  wide! 
The  prophecy  which  said  the  house  would  fall 
And  thereby  crush  me,  must  bring  down  the  sky, 
The  only  roof  above  me  where  I  sit 
Or  ere  it  prove  its  oracle  today. 
Stand  fast,  ye  pillars  of  the  constant  Heavens 
As  Life  doth  in  me  —  /  who  did  not  die 
That  day  in  Athens  when  the  people's  scorn 
Hissed  toward  the  sun  as  if  to  darken  it 
Because  my  thoughts  burned  too  much  for  the  eyes 
Over  my  head,  because  I  spoke  my  Greek 
Too  deep  down  in  my  soul  to  suit  their  case. 
Who  did  not  die  to  see  the  solemn  vests 
Of  my  white  chorus  round  the  thymele 
Flutter  like  doves,  and  sweep  back  like  a  cloud 
Before  the  shrill-lipped  people.  ... 

Except  for  these,  the  new  poems  by  Robert  Brown- 
ing are  either  failures  or  trifles.  There  are  rhym- 
ing tours  de  force,  of  which  the  best  is  the  fre- 
quently quoted  quatrain: 

Venus,  sea-froth's  child, 
Playing  old  Gooseberry, 
Marries  Lord  Rosebery 
To  Miss  de  Rothschild. 

As  I  have  heard  it,  by  the  way,  the  w^rd  "  Hannah  " 
has  taken  the  place  of  the  word  "  Miss."  There 
are  also  odd  squibs  and  album-pieces  of  the  sort 
that  no  great  poet  would  commit  if  he  thought  they 

37 


Books  in  General 

would  be  reprinted  after  his  death.  The  Mrs. 
Browning  poems  are  no  better  worth  preserving. 
A  line  from  The  Enchantress  and  another  from 
Leila,  a  Tale,  will  convey  an  idea  of  their  nature 
more  exactly  than  any  words  of  mine: 

A  little  hark  is  sleeping  on  the  billow 

"  It  is,"  the  Father  cried,  "  It  is,  it  is  my  boy!  " 

One  is  reminded  of  Gilbert's :  "It  was,  it  was  the 
cat."     "  They're  right;  it  was  the  cat." 

The  Epistle  to  a  Canary  is  neat,  but  cannot  be  men- 
tioned in  the  same  breath  with  the  poetess's  To 
Flash,  My  Dog,  with  which  the  public  has  been  fa- 
miliar for  about  seventy  years.  So  on  the  whole 
one  hopes  that,  in  spite  of  Sir  Frederic  Kenyon's 
theory  of  inevitability,  the  rest  of  Mrs.  Browning's 
unpublished  works  will  remain  undisturbed  in  the 
tomb.  She  was  occasionally  a  great  poet,  but  the 
corpus  of  her  inferior  verse  is  already  large  enough 
to  tax  the  perseverance  of  most  of  her  readers. 

The  most  interesting  part  of  the  volume  (except 
for  jEschylus'  Soliloquy)  is  certainly  the  collection, 
at  the  end,  of  certain  criticisms  by  Miss  Barrett  upon 
her  future  husband's  poems.  These  alone  would 
make  the  new  volume  worth  having.  They  are  pre- 
cisely what  one  would  expect  from  Mrs.  Browning. 
She  is  down  on  Browning's  bad  grammar,  on  his 
38 


The  New  Browning  Poems 

obscurities,  and,  above  all,  on  his  rhythmical  inequali- 
ties. She  is  always  acute,  and  her  position  is  always 
defensible;  but  often,  in  her  passion  for  restoring 
missing  particles,  for  smoothing  things  out  and  reg- 
ularizing them,  for  making  Browning  softer,  she 
suggests  changes  (he  adopted  some  of  them)  that 
are  not  improvements.  She  takes  the  line  (from 
The  Boy  and  the  Angel) 

Morning,   noon,   eve   and  night 

and  asks  if  Browning  prefers  it  to 

Morning,   evening,   noon   and   night. 

Or  she  quotes  from  Said: 

For  in  the  black  midtent  silence 
three  drear  days 

and  says  characteristically:  "A  word  seems  omit- 
ted before  silence  —  and  the  short  line  is  too  short 
to  the  ear."  But  her  suggestions  are  sometimes 
very  striking  in  their  rightness;  and  these  notes  are 
an  interesting  addition  to  the  small  body  of  good 
material  of  the  sort  that  exists  in  English. 


39 


Pidgin-English  for  Germans 

^^7^  URZES  Handbuch  fur  Neger-Englisch  an 
§^  der  fVestkuste  Afrikas  unter  besonderer 
-*-  -^  Beriicksichtigung  von  Kamerun:  von  Gun- 
ther  V.  Hag  en,  Leutnant  in  der  Kaiserlichen  Schutz- 
truppe  fur  Kamerun.  That  is  the  title  of  a  book 
which  a  friend  of  mine,  with  an  eye  for  something 
more  amusing  than  helmets  or  pieces  of  shell, 
brought  home  from  the  Cameroons.  It  was  always 
a  sore  point  with  the  Germans  in  West  Africa  that 
they  had  to  learn  pidgin-English  to  talk  to  the  na- 
tives in  their  own  colony.  Curiously,  pidgin-Eng- 
lish was  much  more  widely  known  in  the  German 
Cameroons  than  in  our  own  neighbouring  colonies. 
The  publication  in  my  hands  is  a  primer  of  pidgin- 
English  for  the  use  of  Germans  on  the  West  Coast. 
It  is  drawn  up  on  the  usual  word-book  model,  and 
gives  the  English  words  in  German  phonetic  spelling. 
The  effect  is  odd. 

Food  naturally  comes  first.     You  get  columns  like 
this.      (I  omit  the  marks  of  quantity.) 


Blatter 

lif 

leaf 

Bohnen 

bins 

beans 

Butter 

hotter 

butter 

Dosenfleisch 

tin-mit 

tin-meat 

Pidgin-English  for  Germans 


Eine  Dose 

won  tin  fruit 

one  tin  fruits 

Friichte 

Gemiise 

wedjetebel 

vegetable 

Kase 

dschiss 

cheese 

Mostrich 

mostert 

mustard 

Sauce 

ssos 

sauce 

After  this  come  more  general  articles,  such  as: 

Kopftuch  hankis  handkerchief 

Spazierstock  woaker-stick         walker-stick 

(sic) 
Tischtuch  tebel-klot  table-cloth 

Eine  Stuck  won  piss  klot        one  piece  cloth 

Zeng 

and  then  parts  of  the  body,  such  as : 


Brust,  bauch         belli 
Bruste  bobbi 

Mund  maus 


belly 

(bob?) 

mouth 


"  Sponge  "  in  German  pidgin-English  appears  as 
"  spantsch,"  "  toothbrush  "  as  "  tuss-brosch," 
"  small-boy  "  as  "  ssmoalbeu,"  "  too  much  "  as  "  tu 
motsch,"  "  duck  "  as  "  dock-faul,"  and  another  an- 
imal as  "  tschakass."  "  Church  "  is  phonetically 
metamorphosed  into  "  tschortsch,"  and  "  gottes- 
lehre  "  falls  to  "  gott-palawer." 


The   strangest  effects,   however,   occur  when  the 

41 


Books  in  General 

useful  sentences  are  reached.  They  look  queerer  in 
the  German  type,  but  I  don't  want  to  make  myself 
a  nuisance  to  the  printer.     Here  are  some  of  them: 

gif  mi  korn  for  mei  hors. 

ei  wont  fresch  mit. 

mek  onjons  for  dem  Bifstick. 

tell  dem  king,  hi  ssell  mi  won  faul  end  tri  egs. 

tu  de,  ei  no  wont  ombrella. 

dem  weit  kot  ei  tek  onli  for  ssonde. 

hi  get  fiwer,  gif  him  kinin. 

ju  most  tek  dem  spir  wonteim  autsseit  for  him 

backsseit. 
beu,  dem  neif  bi  dorti,  bring  oser  won. 
dem  mischen-massa  scho  dem  mischen-beu  mek  buk 

for  dschormen. 
dem  dog  bi  dorti. 
ei  won't  oal  haus  for  won  sseit  of  dem  taun,  bikosz 

mi  no  wont  me  pipel  tif  ju  szom  ting, 
ju  mek  proper  hoi  raund  mei  tent,  if  ren  kom  for 

neitteim? 

The  isolated  phrases  lead  up  at  last  to  a  regular  con- 
versation: 

Q.  elefant  lif  for  busch? 

A.  no  massa. 

Q.  bot  ei  tink,  won  ssonde  bifor  jur  broser  kill 

won? 
A.  jes,  bot  onli  ssmoal  won. 


42 


Pidgin-English  for  Germans 

The  next  section  is  devoted  to  conversations,  "  auf 
dem  Kriegsmarsche "  and  are  largely  concerned 
with  the  commissariat.  "  Stillge-standen !  Augen 
rechts!"  are  German  remarks  introduced  freely 
amid  the  pidgin-English.  Finally,  are  instructions 
for  the  conduct  of  negotiations,  "  in  einer  Faktorei." 
The  answer  to  a  man  who  tells  you  he  will  give  you 
so  much  tobacco  for  a  shilling  is:  "  dem  no  bi  ennof, 
ju  most  gif  mi  tu  lif  mor." 

The  author  In  his  Vorwort,  wrote  that:  "  Pid- 
gin-English is  a  makeshift  which,  in  a  measurable 
time  will,  one  may  hope,  become  obsolete,  owing  to 
the  spread  of  the  German  tongue  amongst  the  na- 
tives."    Alas,  for  human  hopes! 


43 


Signer  Marinetti's  Masterpiece 

CURIOUS  things  seem  to  get  into  charitable 
sales.  A  little  while  ago  one,  in  aid  of 
wounded  soldiers,  was  held  in  the  Cale- 
donian Market,  and  the  public  flocked  to  see 
duchesses  spreading  their  wares  on  stones  usually 
consecrated  to  the  venders  of  second-hand  tables, 
chairs,  vases,  door-knockers,  and  gas-brackets. 
Amongst  the  articles  sold  on  this  occasion  were  a 
number  of  books  autographed  by  their  authors. 
Some  of  these  fetched  large  prices  —  some  of  them 
did  not.  The  latter  included  a  copy  of  Mafarka, 
Le  Futuriste,  signed  in  a  fine  flowing  hand  by  its 
author,  Signor  Marlnetti.  It  has  now  reached  me. 
Though  I  had  been  familiar  with  many  of  Signor 
Marinettl's  works,  and  though  I  had  heard  him  re- 
cite his  famous  Siege  of  Adrianople  with  the  per- 
spiration pouring  down  his  forehead  and  his  voice 
growing  hoarse  from  intermittent  efforts  to  imitate 
the  boom  of  the  Bulgarian  guns,  this  novel  I  had  not 
hitherto  read.  I  have  now  read  it;  and  I  certainly 
think  that  the  hair,  however  long,  of  the  lady  who 
sold  it  would  have  stood  for  long  on  end  had  she 
been  made  acquainted  with  its  contents.  I  have  an 
idea  that,  after  running  into  several  editions,  it  was 
suppressed  in  France.  It  certainly  deserved  to  be. 
44 


Signer  Marinetti's  Masterpiece 

An  English  translation  would  not  have  a  lifetime  of 
five  minutes.  The  iridescent  hues  of  The  Rainbow 
pale  and  fade  before  it. 

The  book  has  several  prominent  characteristics, 
some  of  which  I  need  not  mention,  but  undoubtedly 
the  dominant  theme  is  the  panegyric  of  savagery,  fe- 
rocity, and  blood.  There  is  more  carnage  to  the 
square  inch  in  this  book  than  in  any  other  that  I  have 
read;  and  though  it  is  conceivable  that  the  novels  of 
the  Marquis  de  Sade  —  to  which  I  have  never  had 
access  —  are  still  more  gruesome,  I  am  inclined  to 
doubt  it.  I  will  not  sketch  the  plot  —  for  there  is 
no  plot.  But  I  may  indicate  one  or  two  of  the  de- 
tails, so  as  to  give  an  idea  of  what  Signor  Marinetti 
finds  beautiful  and  amusing.  In  one  chapter  there 
is  a  great  battle  between  King  Mafarka  and  his 
brother  and  an  innumerable  host  of  wild  desert  dogs, 
which  are  pounded  into  a  pulp  by  large  stones  flung 
from  catapults.  Later  on,  Mafarka's  brother,  who 
is  newly  married,  disappears.  Mafarka,  very  con- 
cerned, goes  to  look  for  him,  and  finds  on  the 
floor  of  his  bedroom  a  few  strips  —  which  are  all 
that  is  left  of  the  bride  —  whilst  the  bridegroom, 
who  has  been  infected  by  hydrophobia,  sits  like  an 
ape  on  the  top  of  a  pillar  with  strings  of  foam  hang- 
ing from  his  jaws. 

But  the  most  striking  episode  —  the  most  strik- 
ing mentionable  episode  —  Is  that  in  which  Mafarka 
shows  a  decadent    and  timid  world  how  it  really 

45 


Books  in  General 

ought  to  deal  with  its  enemies.  He  assembles  his 
Court  in  a  dimly  lit  underground  chamber.  One 
wall  of  this  chamber  is  of  glass,  and  forms  one  side 
of  an  enormous  tank,  communicating,  by  means  of 
gratings,  with  the  sea  overhead.  In  this  tank  are 
collected  sharks,  octopuses,  and  all  the  ugHest  and 
most  uncanny  fish  which  infest  the  oceans  of  the 
world.  There  is  a  meal;  and  then,  reclining  on 
luxurious  cushions,  and  feeding  their  senses  on  the 
most  languorous  of  scents,  the  guests  watch  a  some- 
what torrid  Oriental  dance.  The  chamber  is  then 
darkened  —  though  the  tank  is  not  —  and  two  of 
the  king's  enemies,  a  fat  old  man  and  a  thin  young 
one,  are  shot  into  the  top  of  the  tank  struggling. 
The  sharks  float  up,  twist  them  down,  and  bite  off 
portions;  the  bits  float  up  again  and  bump  against 
the  top,  whilst  the  sharks  sail  round  below  wonder- 
ing what  has  become  of  their  prey.  Soon  they  track 
it  again,  and  the  process  recommences.  The  details 
of  the  disintegration,  the  lines  and  colours  made  by 
the  "  remains  "  as  they  drift  and  toss  through  green 
waters,  the  horrible  quiet  movements  of  the  fishes  — 
these  are  all  described  with  a  revolting  accuracy 
which  makes  one's  blood  cold.  It  still  haunts  my 
dreams.  It  was  certainly  an  odd  thing  to  get  at  a 
Wounded  Allies  sale.  But  I  suppose  it  all  brings 
grist  to  the  mill. 

In  the  end  the  hero,  if  he  may  be  so  described, 
goes  to  something  that  appears  to  be  heaven  in 
something  that  looks  like  an  aeroplane  —  but  about 
46 


Signor  Marinetti's  Masterpiece 

here  Signor  Marlnettl's  lyricism  gets  too  confused 
for  my  understanding.  This  was,  I  believe,  the  first 
manifesto  of  the  Futurist  School  which,  before  the 
war,  some  people  took  almost  seriously.  The 
world  before  the  war  must  indeed  have  been  a  bar- 
ren place  to  its  author;  he  had  to  get  what  poor  sus- 
tenance he  could  out  of  watching  fights  with  fists 
at  public  meetings.  Let  us  hope  that  he  has  found 
slaughter  as  invigorating  and  enjoyable  as  he  always 
said  it  was. 


47 


Fitzgerald's  Second  Thoughts 

TIERE  have  been  versions  of  Omar  Khay- 
yam since  Fitzgerald's.  There  have  been 
versions  more  Hteral  than  his,  and  ver- 
sions which  have  included  far  more  than  he  did 
of  the  many  hundreds  of  quatrains  which  float 
about  the  East  attached  to  the  name  of  Omar.  But 
a  comparison  of  other  translations  with  Fitzgerald's 
is  the  best  means  of  heightening  one's  wonder  at  his 
supreme  genius  for  translation.  Omar  is  so  exceed- 
ingly pointed  that  he  is  interesting  even  in  the  bald- 
est version;  but  Fitzgerald  made  him  a  great  Eng- 
lish poet.  This  is  all  commonplace,  but  common- 
places would  cease  to  be  recognized  as  such  if  they 
were  not  occasionally  repeated,  and  one  must  do 
one's  duty.  The  occasion  of  these  remarks  is  the 
appearance  of  a  beautiful  variorum  edition  of  Fitz- 
gerald's Omar,  by  Mr.  Frederick  Evans. 

Generally  speaking,  variorum  editions  appeal 
more  to  the  scholar  than  to  the  ordinary  reading 
person,  who  prefers  to  "  go  straight  on  "  and  is  con- 
tent with  "  any  good  edition."  Even  where  writers 
have  been  in  the  habit  of  touching-up  their  work  at 
every  fresh  issue  the  alterations  are  not  usually  so 
extensive  as  to  command  the  attention  of  any  one 
but  the  "  professed  student  " :  a  description  normally 
48 


Fitzgerald's  Second  Thoughts 

applied  to  the  kind  of  person  to  whom  the  "  Corpus 
Poetarum  "  is  really  the  "  Corpus  Vile  Poetarum." 
But  the  case  of  Fitzgerald's  work  is  certainly  an  ex- 
ception. Fitzgerald's  modifications  in  his  text  were 
so  extensive  and  so  varying  in  quality  that  an  ac- 
quaintance with  a  single  edition  of  it  is  really  quite 
inadequate. 

Mr.  Evans's  edition  gives,  "  for  the  first  time  col- 
lectively, each  Stanza  in  the  full  text  of  each  of  its 
versions,  as  given  in  the  four  editions  (1859,  1868, 
1872,  1879),  that  contain  any  differences  in  text." 
Each  stanza  has  a  whole  page  to  itself;  if  it  appears 
in  one  edition  only,  then  the  spaces  that  variant 
stanzas,  had  there  been  any  in  other  editions,  would 
have  occupied  are  left  blank.  The  whole  history  of 
each  stanza,  therefore,  can  be  seen  at  a  glance  with- 
out reference  to  notes  or  appendices.  The  nature 
and  extent  of  Fitzgerald's  modifications  may  be  illus- 
trated by  the  life-story  of  the  very  first  stanza.  In 
the  first  edition  this  appeared  as: 

Awake!  for  Morning  in  the  Bowl  of  Night 

Has  flung  the  Stone  that  puts  the  Stars  to  Flight; 

And  lot  the  Hunter  of  the  East  has  caught 
The  Sultan's  Turret  in  a  Noose  of  Light. 

In  the  second  edition  it  was  changed  to : 

TFake!     For  the  Sun  behind  yon  Eastern  height 
Has  chased  the  Session  of  the  Stars  from  Night; 

49 


Books  in  General 

And,  to  the  field  of  Heaven  ascending,  strikes 
The  Sultan's  Turret  with  a  Shaft  of  Light. 

In  the  third  and  fourth  editions  it  becomes : 

Wake!     For  the  Sun,  who  scattered  into  flight 
The  Stars  before  him  from  the  Field  of  Night, 
Drives  Night  along  with  them  from  Heav'n,  and 
strikes 
The  Sultan's  Turret  with  a  Shaft  of  Light. 

The  first  draft  of  edition  three  having  begun: 

JVake!     For  the  Sun  before  him  into  Night 
A   Signal  flung   that  put   the  Stars   to   flight. 

This  is  certainly  one  of  the  cases  in  which  the  first 
version  was  unquestionably  the  best.  There  are 
others;  but  the  cases  in  which  improvements  were 
made  were  more  numerous;  and  although  Fitzgerald 
in  only  two  or  three  instances  left  a  quatrain  un- 
changed in  all  his  editions  there  was  point  enough  in 
his  alteration  to  acquit  him  of  an  unnecessary  itch 
for  tinkering. 

Of  the  stanza  quoted  the  first  version  is  the  one 
that  has  passed  into  common  speech.  But  in  an- 
other even  better-known  quatrain  the  "  current  "  ver- 
sion is  the  last. 

A  Book  of  Verses  underneath  the  Bough, 

A  Jug  of  Wine,  a  Loaf  of  Bread  —  and  Thou  .  . 

50 


Fitzgerald's  Second  Thoughts 

originally  ran : 

Here  with  a  Loaf  of  Bread  beneath  the  Bough, 
A  Flask  of  Wine,  a  Book  of  Verse  —  and   Thou. 

In  yet  another  familiar  instance  it  is  difficult  to 
choose  between  the  two  principal  variations.  In  the 
first  version  we  get: 

What,  without  asking,  hither  hurried  Whence? 
And,  without  asking,  Whither  hurried  hence! 

Another  and  another  Cup  to  drown 
The  Memory  of  this  Impertinence. 

But  in  the  fourth  edition  the  last  two  lines  run : 

Oh,  many  a  Cup  of  this  forbidden  Wine 
Must   drown    the    rnemory    of   that   insolence! 

The  first  is  obviously  the  more  terse,  more  vigor- 
ous and  more  amusing;  but  the  other  would  com- 
mend itself  to  some  as  being  more  placid,  less  abrupt 
in  transition  and  working  in  the  additional  point  of 
Prohibition. 

Each  man  can  make  his  selection  of  versions  for 
himself.  For  me,  I  have  made  my  own.  But 
there  is  one  stanza  at  which  I  cannot  help  smiling  in 
all  its  forms.  It  is  the  one  which  contains  the  state- 
ment that  the  Lion  and  the  Lizard  keep  the  Courts 
where   Jamshyd   gloried   and   drank   deep.     When- 

51 


Books  in  General 

ever  I  look  at  It  I  think  of  a  skit  play  which  St.  John 
Hankin  wrote,  and  in  which,  after  a  heated  exchange 
of  words,  the  Lion  demanded  of  the  Lizard:  /'  Are 
you  keeping  this  Court  or  am  I?  "  A  thing  of  this 
sort  is  enough  to  make  one  defile  the  grave,  if  one 
could  identify  it,  of  the  man  who  invented  burlesque. 
That,  of  course,  is  the  reason  why  I  give  it  further 
publicity. 


52 


Property  in  Proper  Names 

A  MULTITUDE  of  British  novelists  breathed 
a  sigh  of  relief  when  it  became  known 
that  a  British  jury  had  turned  down  very 
emphatically  the  claim  for  damages,  brought  against 
Mr.  George  Moore  by  a  music-hall  artist  named 
Louis  Seymour.  Mr.  Moore  produced  a  new  edi- 
tion of  his  book,  A  Modern  Lover,  under  the  new 
name  of  Lewis  Seymour  and  Some  Women.  The 
real  Mr.  Seymour  alleged  that  he  had  suffered  con- 
siderable annoyance  owing  to  this.  Some  very  un- 
pleasant things  were  said  about  the  book  in  the 
course  of  the  action.  Counsel  for  the  plaintiff  made 
a  reference  to  "  a  mass  of  salacious  and  disgusting 
details  which  rendered  the  book  unique  in  porno- 
graphy," and  the  judge  jumped  hard  both  upon  the 
hero  and  upon  the  book.  Many  people  perhaps 
will  share  the  judge's  views  of  some  of  Mr.  Moore's 
literary  efforts,  and  some  perhaps  would  be  happy 
to  see  Mr.  Moore  mulcted  anywhere  and  for  any 
reason.  But  no  sensible  man  can  help  feeling  that 
the  jury  was  perfectly  right  when  it  said:  ( i )  that 
no  reasonable  person  would  think  that  the  Lewis 
Seymour  of  Mr.  Moore's  book  was  a  portrait  of  a 
real  person;  and  (2)  that  no  reasonable  person 
would  think  that  Mr.  Moore's  book  referred  to  the 
plaintiff.     One  cannot  help  feeling,  in  fact,  that  the 

53 


Books  in  General 

plaintiff  must  have  been  a  pretty  cool  customer  to 
bring  the  action  at  all,  for  the  book  was  written  long 
ago,  and  the  real  Mr.  Seymour  only  took  his  present 
name  a  few  days  ago,  his  father's  name  being  Kemp- 
ner !  There  therefore  could  be  no  possible  sugges- 
tion that  Mr.  Moore  had  maliciously  attacked  him 
or  had  even  heard  of  him  when  he  wrote. 

I  remember  two  other  cases  of  the  sort.  In  the 
first  case  a  paper  in  the  North  published  a  sketch 
in  which  a  character  named,  I  think,  Artemus  Jones, 
was  exhibited  in  an  unfavourable  light.  It  was  held 
to  be  proved  that  plaintiff  was  liable  to  suffer  serious 
damage  from  the  libel,  and  he  was  awarded  a  large 
sum  of  money.  A  year  or  two  later  a  Sunday  news- 
paper ran  a  serial  story  in  which  one  of  the  less  ex- 
emplary characters  bore  a  conspicuous  and  unusual 
name  which  happened  to  be  that  of  a  gentleman  who 
lived  in  much  the  same  professional  world  as  the 
fictitious  character.  Here,  again,  heavy  damages 
were  given.  Even  those  cases  caused  novelists 
qualms,  for  it  was  evident  that  coincidence  might  go 
far  and  the  most  innocent  of  men  might  possibly  libel 
and,  if  he  were  accidentally  close  enough  in  his  de- 
scription, seriously  injure,  a  total  stranger.  But  if 
the  enterprising  Mr.  Seymour  had  won  his  case,  one 
simply  does  not  know  what  novelists  would  have 
done.  They  would  still  presumably  have  been  all 
right  with  their  heroes  and  heroines  —  at  least 
with  those  that  were  well  up  to  the  usual  novelist's 
standard  of  impeccability.  But  as  for  the  ordinary 
54 


Property  in  Proper  Names 

light  and  shade  people,  and  still  more  the  villains, 
the  weaklings,  the  profligates,  the  criminals,  the 
murderers,  the  blackmailers,  the  coiners,  the  spies 
and  the  adventuresses,  it  would  have  been  utterly 
impossible  to  name  them  at  all  without  imperilling 
one's  household  and  the  whole  future  of  one's  wife 
and  children. 

For  unusual  names  are  no  guarantee  of  immunity 
whatever.  You  may  work  as  hard  as  you  like  in 
the  regions  of  the  grotesque  and  the  unlikely,  but 
when  you  have  concocted  names  like  Arabel  Pickels 
or  Marmaduke  Honeyblossom  Whoopingnose,  the 
chances  are  that  from  Clapton  or  Sydenham  or 
Blackpool  or  Merthyr  Tydvil  some  Dread  Unknown 
will  start  up  and  ask  why  his  or  her  name,  long 
known  and  honoured  in  the  locality,  has  been  thus  pil- 
loried. Dickens's  names  look  preposterous  enough, 
but  he  used  to  get  them  out  of  the  London  Direc- 
tory. If  he  had  made  them  up  out  of  his  head  he 
would  probably  have  found  them  in  the  London  Di- 
rectory afterwards.  No  name  is  entirely  impossible 
in  this  country,  as  I  realized  recently  when,  walking 
along  the  main  street  of  a  small  cathedral  city,  I  ob- 
served over  a  draper's  shop  the  almost  incredible 
cognomen  of  Gotobed.  The  only  people  who  do 
occasionally  produce  an  English  name  that  probably 
is  unreal  are  French  novelists.  They  try  to  do  the 
thing  correctly.  They  consequently  construct  their 
English  surnames  out  of  English  surnames  that  they 
have  seen.     But  they  very  often  put  together  sylla- 

55 


Books  in  General 

bles  which,  though  quite  common,  are  for  some 
reason  quite  incompatible.  They  have  seen,  for 
example,  such  names  as  Oldham  and  Hawkins,  and 
they  will  come  out  with  an  English  governess  called 
Agnes  Oldkins,  and  a  sporting  English  baronet  with 
the  highly  improbable  designation  of  Sir  John  Haw- 
ham.  But  even  here  I  do  not  feel  that  I  am  on  per- 
fectly safe  ground,  and  I  should  not  really  be  sur- 
prised if  after  this  appears  letters  reached  me  from 
eager  readers  in  the  backwoods  assuring  me  that  in 
their  districts  the  name  of  Oldkins  and  Hawham  are 
and  always  have  been  most  common  in  the  parish 
register. 

Common  names,  one  need  scarcely  say,  would 
have  been  no  protection  whatever  if  Mr.  Seymour 
had  won  his  action.  It  was  pointed  out  in  Court 
that  there  were  three  persons  of  the  name  of 
Louis  Seymour  in  the  London  Directory.  I  do  not 
see  why,  if  one  Mr.  Seymour  had  won,  another  Mr. 
Seymour  should  not  —  assuming  that  one  of  the 
others  were  the  sort  of  person  who  would  bring  an 
action  —  have  had  a  go  himself  and  won  also;  or 
why,  for  that  matter,  twenty  Lewis  Seymours  from 
all  over  the  kingdom  should  not  have  come  in  turn  to 
Court,  alleged  in  turn  that  their  private  lives  had 
been  embittered  by  the  poisonous  emissions  of  Mr. 
Moore's  pen,  and  secured  seriatim  such  damages 
that  in  the  end  Mr.  Moore  would  have  had  to  sell 
Moore  Hall  (thus  escaping  from  the  dispute  about 
the  graziers)  and  go  to  America  steerage  in  order 
56 


Property  in  Proper  Names 

to  begin  a  new  life  in  a  place  where  he  was  not 
known.  Still  worse  would  have  been  the  fate  of 
novelists  who  should  have  called  the  evil-doer  John 
Jones,  Henry  Smith,  William  Brown,  Edward  Wil- 
liams, or  Evan  Davies.  Claimants  would  have 
rushed  forward  by  thousands,  and  we  might  even 
have  come  to  the  point  at  which  people  would  find 
it  worth  while  to  assume  the  name  of  Quilp,  Raffles, 
Fagan,  Bill  Sykes,  Svengali,  Shylock,  or  even  Cain, 
in  order  to  sue  authors  or  publishers  who  appeared 
prosperous  enough  to  offer  a  good  harvest.  In  the 
end  novelists  would  have  been  driven  to  calling  their 
people  by  letters  or  numbers.  We  should  have  read 
that:  "A.  B.  buried  her  head  in  her  arms,  and 
wept  long  and  bitterly  as  she  thought  of  that  beauti- 
ful day  when  she  and  C.  D.  had  sat  in  bliss  under 
the  blue  Mediterranean  sky  and  by  the  side  of  the 
blue  Mediterranean  sea,  before  that  awful  day  when 
E.  F.  and  G.  H.  had  come  between  them  ";  or  that: 
"  No.  I  flung  open  the  door  with  a  shout.  As  it 
opened  he  saw  No.  8  and  No.  76  in  close  confabu- 
lation over  a  bundle  of  papers  which  the  latter  hur- 
riedly passed  behind  his  back  to  No.  2002,  though 
not  sufficiently  rapidly  to  escape  No.  I's  attention." 
The  only  alternative  would  have  been  for  novelists 
to  have  given  up  writing  altogether.  And,  on  the 
whole,  I  am  not  sure  that  this 


57 


The  Inferior  Poems  of  Keats 

THE  Florence  Press  Keats  is  one  of  the 
most  beautiful  editions  of  recent  years. 
The  edition  is,  however,  interesting  for 
other  reasons.  In  the  first  place.  Sir  Sidney  Colvin 
has  put  in  the  newly-discovered  poems  which  he  pub- 
lished in  the  Times  Literary  Supplement ;  and  in  the 
second  place,  he  has  arranged  the  poems  for  the  first 
time  in  chronological  order.  Lord  Houghton,  it 
may  be  added,  endeavoured  to  do  that  in  the  edition 
recently  reissued  in  the  "  Shilling  Bohn  Series." 
Keats  owes  more  to  Lord  Houghton  than  to  any 
other  editor;  but  that  did  not  make  his  lordship's 
chronology  sound  or  even  careful.  Sir  Sidney  Col- 
vin's  appears  as  nearly  exact  as  any  editor  could 
make  it;  where  his  order  is  not  that  of  time  the  de- 
viation is  deliberate  —  for  example,  he  lumps  to- 
gether the  slight  pieces  intended  to  be  funny.  The 
object  of  his  plan  is  to  enable  readers  to  see  Keats's 
development  in  proper  perspective,  and  to  place  his 
feebler  works  in  their  proper  temporal  relation  to 
his  masterpieces. 

If  the  edition  had  no  other  merits  I  should  use  it, 
if  only  for  its  almost  perfect  print  and  its  total  ab- 
sence of  notes.  It  takes  a  good  deal  of  effort  for  a 
man  of  Sir  Sidney  Colvin's  learning  to  restrain  him- 
58 


The  Inferior  Poems  of  Keats 

self.  He  Is  bound  to  be  tempted  to  explain,  for  ex- 
ample (in  a  quite  elementary  work),  that  Apollo- 
nius  must  not  be  confused  with  Apollinaris  or 
Apenta;  or  (in  a  more  ambitious  edition)  that, 
although  Keats  in  Lamia  refers  to  Apollonius  as 
having  a  bald  old  crown,  Keats's  authority,  Philos- 
tratus,  expressly  states  (in  another  connection)  that 
the  philosopher  was  exceedingly  hairy  —  in  fact,  as 
hairy  as  a  sound  vegetarian  ought  to  be.  This 
point,  by  the  by,  has  not  (as  far  as  I  am  aware) 
been  made  by  any  critic  before  myself,  I  present  it 
to  Keats's  next  commentator.  At  this  late  date  any 
little  extra  should  be  welcome.  But  at  any  rate, 
happily.  Sir  Sidney  Colvin  has  no  use  for  it;  and  yet 
how  easy  it  would  have  been  to  write  a  whole  volume 
of  notes  if  he  did  not  go  beyond  explaining  why  he 
chose  to  think  that  certain  poems  were  written  in 
September  rather  than  in  October  or  in  January 
rather  than  in  February. 

At  the  same  time  I  don't  think  that  the  chronolog- 
ical arrangement  will  much  increase  one's  apprecia- 
tion of  Keats.  And  the  reason  is  that  his  inferior 
poems,  wherever  you  may  place  them  in  the  book, 
are  so  infinitely  inferior  to  his  best  that  one  almost 
thinks,  as  one  reads  them,  that  there  must  have  been 
two  Keats,  not  one  Keats.  One  may  object  to  selec- 
tions —  to  The  Golden  Book  of  Ezekiel  Peaky- 
blinder  and  The  Cream  of  Christopher  Marlowe  — 
but  Keats's  worst  is  such  feeble  stuff  that  it  is  simply 
not  worth  having  at  all.     It  is  not  merely  a  question 

59 


Books  in  General 

of  the  early  poems.  Most  of  his  first  volume  is 
worthless  —  though  it  contains  the  Chapman  Son- 
net —  but  in  some  of  its  dullest  passages  the  devel- 
opment of  his  craft  may  be  observed.  But  he  went 
on  writing  much  worse  things  when  his  powers  were 
fully  matured.  It  is,  perhaps,  bad  luck  on  him  that 
his  jocular  verses  in  letters  have  been  dug  up;  but 
the  pompous  vapidities  of  Otho  the  Great  and  the 
skittish  vapidities  of  the  Cap  and  Bells  were  the 
results  of  elaborate  efforts  made  when  his  genius 
had  reached  its  culmination.  Otho  the  Great  is 
roughly  contemporaneous  with  Lamia  and  comes  be- 
tween the  Ode  to  a  Nightingale  and  the  Ode  to 
Autumn.  Otho  is  a  full  length  blank-verse  play  oc- 
cupying ninety  pages  in  this  edition.  Its  author  had 
already  written  in  Hyperion  blank  verse  equal  in 
places  to  any  in  the  language.  Yet  there  are 
scarcely  in  Otho  even  a  dozen  lines  together  of  good 
rhetoric,  much  less  poetry.  As  he  was  unused  to 
play-writing  one  can  understand  how  Keats  fell  into 
the  trap  of  Elizabethanism  and  dealt  in  Carnage, 
Wittols  and  Gulls.  But  one  cannot  understand  how 
he  disguised  himself  so  completely. 

The  Cap  and  Bells  is  much  worse.  It  is  unfin- 
ished: that  is  the  only  reason  it  did  not  come  to  a 
bad  end.  Keats  here  was  deliberately  trying  to  em- 
ulate Byron's  satiric  triumphs.  Unfortunately  he 
had  no  comic  ideas,  little  gift  for  epigram,  a  narrow 
range  of  contemporary  allusion,  and  could  not 
even  tickle  the  midriff  with  those  polysyllabic  or 
60 


The  Inferior  Poems  of  Keats 

otherwise  eccentric  rhymes  which  are  frequently  em- 
ployed by  ineffective  wags  to  cover  up  their  resource- 
lessness  and  impress  a  public  very  much  in  awe  of 
these  properties  of  the  wizard's  cave.  Now  and 
then  you  get  a  stanza  of  some  dignity  and  vigour. 
The  stanza  describing  the  wedding  morning  is  one 
such : 

The  morn  is  full  of  holiday;  loud  hells 
JVith  rival  clamours  ring  from  every  spire; 
Cunningly-station' d  music  dies  and  swells 
In  echoing  places;  when  the  winds  respire, 
Light  flags  stream  out  like  gauzy  tongues  of  fire. 
A  metropolitan  murmur,  lifeful,  zvarm, 
Comes  from  the  northern  suburbs;  rich  attire 
Freckles  with  red  and  gold  the  moving  swarm, 
JFhile  here  and  there  clear  trumpets  blow  a  keen 
alarm. 

This  stanza  is  not  quite  Keats;  but  at  least  it  it 
not  the  author  of  The  Eve  of  St.  Agnes  trying  to 
write  like  the  author  of  Beppo  and  Don  Juan. 

The  brief  fragment  of  King  Stephen  is  much  bet- 
ter. Swinburne  thought  that  it  showed  that  Keats, 
had  he  lived,  might  have  been  a  considerable  poetic 
dramatist.  The  language  here  Is  still  Elizabethan. 
Lines  like : 

Now  may  we  lift  our  bruised  visors  up 
And  take  the  flattering  freshness  of  the  air  — 

6i 


Books  in  General 

and 

Royal  Maud 
From  the  throng' d  towers  of  Lincoln  hath  looked 

down 
Like  Pallas  from  the  walls  of  Ilion, 
And  seen  her  enemies  havock'd  at  her  feet. 
She  greets  most  noble  Gloucester  from  the  heart  — 

are  simply  burlesque  Elizabethan.  But  the  muscles 
of  some  of  the  speeches  show  through  their  trick'd 
up  clothing;  the  action  moves  quickly;  and  even  in 
the  few  pages  which  are  all  that  remain  of  the  play 
Keats  succeeds  in  the  highly  difficult  feat  of  making 
us  take  an  interest  in  King  Stephen. 

If,  by  the  way,  some  of  the  passages  in  King 
Stephen  hark  back  too  much,  there  is  one  at  least 
which  appears  to  hark  forward.  Royal  Maud  is 
discussing  the  treatment  of  Stephen,  her  prisoner- 
of-war.  She  is  very  shocked  at  the  way  in  which  he 
is  being  pampered: 

My  Lord  of  Chester^  is't  true  what  I  hear 

Of  Stephen  of  Boulogne^  our  prisoner, 

That  he,  as  a  fit  penance  for  his  crimes, 

Eats  wholesome,  sweet  and  palatable  food 

Of  Gloucester's  golden  dishes  —  drinks  pure  wine, 

Lodges  soft? 

It  is  like  the   accounts  we   heard   of   Donington 
Hall. 
62 


One's  Favourite  Author 
Defined 

A  MAN  asked  me,  with  mediaeval  bluntness, 
who  were  my  favourite  authors.  "  Oh," 
I  said,  "Homer,  Dante,  &c."  This  did 
not  satisfy  him.  "  Well,"  I  said,  "  What  do  you 
mean  by  favourites?  I  am  very  fond  indeed  of 
Wordsworth."  "  Yes,"  he  said,  "  but  would  you 
read  him  in  prose  on  any  subject  he  cared  to  write 
about?"  "I  should  think  not,"  I  said.  "Well, 
whom  would  you  ?  " 

It  was  a  new  method  of  approach,  and  at  first  I 
could  think  of  nobody  except  Mr.  Chesterton  whom 
I  would  read  on  any  subject  —  though  remembering 
what  he  had  said  would  be  another  matter.  All  the 
illustrious  dead  and  the  notorious  living  went  through 
my  head  seriatim,  stretching  out  pale,  appealing 
hands  which  I  could  not  persuade  myself  to  take. 
Milton  on  Church  Government?  No,  I  would  not 
be  able  to  read  that;  I  would  rather  read  Sir 
Thomas  Browne  on  the  subject,  although  I  do  not 
think  him  as  great  a  writer  as  Milton.  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  may  do  as  a  start;  he  was  odd  and  sympa- 
thetic enough  never  to  bore  me.  Tennyson  on  the 
Needs  of  the  Navy?     No,   I  miss  that  out,  even 

63 


Books  in  General 

when  he  is  writing  in  verse.  Shelley  on  Proportional 
Representation?  Well!  Gibbon  on  the  Needs  of 
Rural  Hampshire?  Dickens  on  Metaphysics? 
Scott  on  Constitutional  History?  George  Eliot  on 
Rent?  Coleridge  on  the  Ego?  Or  any  of  them  on 
current  Italian  politics?  As  I  put  all  these  ques- 
tions or  had  them  put,  I  found  how  limited  was  my 
contact  with  many  of  the  greatest  men  or,  con- 
versely, how  limited  was  their  appeal.  And  It 
gradually  turned  out  that  I  had  a  most  peculiar  col- 
lection of,  so  to  say,  intimates,  whom  I  should  be 
happy  to  read  whatever  they  were  writing  about  and 
whatever  my  ignorance  —  or  even  theirs  !  —  of  the 
subjects  discussed. 

There  are  two  living  poets  who  seldom  step  out- 
side their  proper  provinces  whom  I  should  find  en- 
gaging on  anything.  I  could  read  anything  (except 
a  few  of  his  longer  novels)  which  was  written,  or 
would  be  written,  by  Henry  James.  I  could  read 
any  conceivable  thing  by  Cobbett,  and  certainly 
anything  by  Charles  Lamb,  were  it  even  on  episte- 
mology  or  morphology  or  the  scholarship  of  Mr. 
Gladstone.  Swift  is  another.  He  might  certainly 
have  written  rottenly  on  ^Esthetics  but  he  would  be- 
yond question  have  written  about  them  like  a  man 
and  a  humorist.  The  same  may  be  said  of  Dr. 
Johnson,  who,  to  those  who  have  a  feeling  for  him, 
could  never  be  dull.  I  would  add  Keats,  Mr.  Max 
Beerbohm,  Shakespeare,  and  Rabelais.  It  is  a  queer 
collection.  In  another  sense  some  of  them  are  not 
64 


One's  Favourite  Author  Defined 

at  all  very  favourite  authors.  I  do  not,  for  instance, 
read  anything  of  Cobbett's  more  than  once  in  three 
years.  But  when  I  do  pick  up  a  book  of  his  I  do  not 
care  what  it  is  about  and  I  have  no  fear  of  being 
bored  or  only  half-interested.  He  is  good  company 
whenever  and  wherever  he  is  called  on.  And  he 
certainly  would  have  been  in  the  flesh,  whereas 
Wordsworth  or  Milton,  on  an  off  day,  would  have 
reduced  one  to  making  remarks  about  the  weather 
—  a  subject,  however,  which  Wordsworth  found  ab- 
normally interesting. 


65 


Swinburne's  Vocabulary 

IT  has  long  been  a  complaint  that  cheap  edi- 
tions of  Swinburne  are  not  obtainable.  Mr. 
Heinemann  has  now  gone  some  way  towards 
providing  one  by  issuing  five  small  volumes  of  his 
poems,  containing,  respectively,  Poems  and  Ballads 
(L),  Poems  and  Ballads  (II.  and  III.),  Tristram, 
Atalanta  and  Erechtheus,  and  Songs  before  Sunrise. 
The  edition  Is  called  the  "  Golden  Pine  Edition." 
At  first  sight  one  thinks  of  a  brand  of  marmalade  or 
of  Californlan  tinned  pineapples.  Then  one  notices 
a  design  of  cones.  Presumably  somebody  desires 
to  forge  one  more  link  between  Swinburne's  name 
and  that  of  "  The  Pines,"  Putney  Hill.  But  even 
then  the  "  Golden  "  Is  a  puzzle,  for  pines,  even  In 
Putney,  are  not  conspicuously  golden.     I  give  It  up. 

Except  for  certain  parts  of  the  plays  and  a  few 
odd  poems,  these  volumes  Include  everything  of 
Swinburne's  In  verse  that  any  one  but  a  rare  enthusi- 
ast can  want.  What  a  misfortune  his  diffuseness 
was.  Take  even  a  feeble  poem  of  Swinburne's  by 
itself,  and  you  are  struck  by  his  eloquence  and  ease; 
but  a  lot  of  them  together  are  tiring  and  monot- 
onous to  a  degree  unequalled  by  any  verse  of  similar 
standing.  One  of  the  best  chapters  in  Mrs.  Mey- 
66 


Swinburne's  Vocabulary 

nell's  recent  Hearts  of  Controversy  was  that  in 
which,  whilst  unreservedly  admitting  the  greatness 
of  some  of  Swinburne's  verse  and  his  right  to  a  high 
place  in  literature,  she  analyzed  his  peculiar  weak- 
nesses. He  lived  on  second-hand  enthusiasms  de- 
rived from  men  living  and  dead  who  were  the  ob- 
jects of  his  unreasoning  admiration  (to  do  him  justice, 
his  enthusiasms  were  always  for  somebody  whom  he 
thought  morally  great,  noble  in  character).  He 
out-shouted  Mazzini  about  Italy  and  Shelley  about 
Liberty.  But  directly  he  was  left  by  himself  to 
judge  or  to  feel  for  himself  he  felt  weakly  or  judged 
inconsistently.  And  to  express  and  illustrate  his 
second-hand  thought  he  had  pocketfulls  of  counters. 
If  he  was  denouncing,  as  Mrs.  Meynell  observes,  he 
denounced  everybody  in  precisely  the  same  words 
and  "  Hell  "  was  certain  to  be  one  of  them.  All 
poets  have  private  vocabularies  in  some  measure.  In 
time  some  professor  of  German  extraction  will  count 
the  number  of  times  that  various  writers  use  various 
words,  find  the  "  dominant-recurrent  "  words  of  each 
and  stigmatize  his  outlook  (or,  more  likely,  his  dis- 
ease) accordingly.  But  Swinburne's  habitual  vocab- 
ulary (though  he  had  at  call  an  enormous  number  of 
words)  was  scarcely  larger  than  an  agricultural  la- 
bourer's, and  he  worked  it  with  unparalleled  vigour 
and  lack  of  discrimination.  It  was  a  poor  sort  of 
thing  that  could  not  be  described  in  terms  of 
"foam"  "flower,"  "barren,"  "salt,"  "sweet," 
"sharp,"  "broken,"  "token,"  "light,"  "fight," 
"  might,"  and  "  right  "  —  for  many  of  them  hunted 

67 


Books  in  General 

in  couples,  or  even  quartets,  merely  because  they  hap- 
pened to  rhyme.  An  out-of-the-way  archaism  lilce 
"  guerdon  "  was  used  by  Swinburne  as  though  it  were 
an  ordinary  "and,"  "the,"  "come"  or  "go," 
merely  because  it  made  a  comfortable  rhyme  with 
"  burden,"  and  burdens,  in  his  world,  were  very  com- 
mon. 

At  this  stage  I  took  the  sortes.  Quite  honestly 
I  opened  a  chance  volume  at  a  chance  page  and  lit- 
erally the  first  thing  I  saw  was  this  stanza  of  Her- 
tha:  — 

Though  sore  be  my  burden 

And  more  than  ye  know, 
And  my  growth  have  no  guerdon 

But  only  to  grow, 
Yet  I  fail  not  of  growing  for  lightnings  above  me 

or  deathworms  below. 
There  we  have  it;  the  language  half-obscuring  the 
not  very  remarkable  thought.  Consonants  and 
vowels  could  not  be  more  fluidly  arranged;  the  sound 
as  an  abracadabra  is  beautiful;  but  the  songs  of 
mouth  and  mind  do  not  harmonize  —  the  former 
chants  the  other  out  of  hearing.  This  is  so  even 
here  in  one  of  his  finer  poems;  in  the  others  there  is 
vox  et  praeterea  nihil.  I  wished  consequently  that  a 
really  perfect  selection  could  be  issued.  A  fairly 
good  one,  prepared  under  Swinburne's  own  supervi- 
sion, exists;  but  a  better  one  is  easily  conceivable,  and 
his  executors  and  publishers  would  find  it  worth  their 
while  if  they  had  made  one. 
68 


Blake  and  His  Myths 

WILLIAM  BLAKE  is  a  standing  temp- 
tation. For  he  was  a  man  of  great 
genius  and  indisputable  sanity,  many  of 
whose  works  are,  as  his  latest  critic  says,  "  perhaps 
the  most  obscure  in  the  whole  range  of  literature." 
Ever  since  people  began  to  realize  that  the  Prophetic 
Books  were  something  more  than  the  grandiose  rav- 
ings of  a  harmless  lunatic,  armies  of  students  have 
worked  continuously  with  tables  of  symbols  at  their 
sides  searching  for  the  key  to  the  mystery.  A  great 
deal  has  been  discovered,  largely  owing  to  the  efforts 
of  Messrs.  Ellis  and  Yeats;  but  it  is  pretty  evident  by 
this  time  that  Blake's  doctrines  will  never  be  pro- 
pounded as  a  coherent  whole. 

M.  Berger  (a  very  good  translation  of  whose 
French  study  of  Blake  has  been  published  by  Chap- 
man &  Hall)  has  no  illusions  about  it.  In  a  book  of 
four  hundred  large  pages  —  certainly  one  of  the 
most  learned  and  Interesting  works;  that  has  ever 
been  written  about  Blake  —  he  examines,  and  so  far 
as  he  can,  explains,  Blake's  writings;  and,  although 
he  fully  appreciates  the  frequent  grandeur  of  the 
poet's  ideas  and  language,  arrives  at  the  mournful 
conclusion  that  his  myth-making  was  his  ruin.  No 
one  could  be  franker.      "  Many,  even  of  the  shorter 

69 


Books  in  General 

pieces,"  he  says,  "  admit  of  various  interpretations, 
all  equally  problematical.  As  for  the  long  poems 
.  .  .  they  defy  all  commentators."  Any  word  may 
mean  anything  and  "  his  language  needs  a  special 
dictionary  which  it  would  be  almost  impossible  to 
compile,  and  the  use  of  which  would  be  destructive 
of  any  real  poetry."  And  no  sooner  have  you  iden- 
tified a  figure  or  a  symbol  than  it  changes  its  clothes: 
"  The  Clod  of  Clay,  for  instance,  symbolizes  soulless 
matter;  but  it  represents  also  man's  first  mother  and 
the  milk,  of  human  kindness." 

It  is  all  perfectly  true.  M.  Berger,  in  spite  of  his 
pessimism  about  the  poet,  explains  as  far  as  he  can. 
He  even  does  much  to  elucidate  passages  like  the  fol- 
owing: 

Bath  .   .   .  is  the  Seventh,  the  physician  and 

The  poisoner;  the  best  and  worst  in  Heaven  and 

Hell; 
Whose    Spectre    first    assimilated    with    Luvah    in 

Heaven  and  Hell, 
A   triple   octave   he   took,   to   reduce  Jerusalem   to 

twelve. 
To  cast  Jerusalem  forth  upon  the  wilds  to  Poplar 

and  Bow, 
To    Maiden    and    Canterbury    in    the    delights    of 

cruelty : 
The  Shuttles  of  death  sing  in  the  sky  to  Islington  and 

Pancrass, 
Round  Mary  bone  to  Tyburn's  River,  weaving  black 

melancholy  as  a  net, 
70 


Blake  and  His  Myths 

And  despair  as  meshes  closely  wove  over  the  west 
of  London, 

Where  mild  Jerusalem  sought  to  repose  in  death  and 
be  no  more. 

She  fled  to  Lambeth's  mild  vale  and  hid  herself  be- 
neath 

The  Surrey  Hills  where  Rephaim  terminates. 

But  the  worst  of  it  is  that  where  Blake's  narratives 
are  made  comprehensible  we  are  not  quite  certain  at 
the  end  whether  the  trouble  was  worth  while.  Urizen 
may  be  the  first  creation:  that  which  first  divides  it- 
self from  Eternity.  Los  may  be  Time  which  binds 
and  rivets  Urizen.  Los  may  also  be  the  prophetic 
spirit  and  Enitharmon,  proceeding  from  Los,  both 
Space  and  Pity.  But  one  feels  all  the  time  that  to  us 
who  do  not  see  these  personages  in  vision  as  Blake 
did,  the  ancient  classical  figures  Chronos,  Ouranos 
and  Terra,  etc.,  would  do  just  as  well.  We  may  dis- 
cover what  Blake  meant:  but  it  will  not  mean  any- 
thing to  us.  M.  Berger  said  that  he  wrote  as  "  a 
mystic  for  mystics  "  and  that  had  he  written  as  "  a 
man  for  men  "  he  "  could  have  stirred  all  his  contem- 
poraries profoundly."  There  is  a  third  way:  to 
write  as  a  mystic  for  "  men  " ;  but  even  the  most  mys- 
tical of  mystics  can  obtain  little  out  of  Blake's  pecu- 
liar cosmogony.  All  that  can  be  done  with  the 
Prophetic  books  is,  as  M.  Berger  suggests,  to  take 
them  "  as  collections  of  isolated  but  richly  suggestive 
fragments." 


71 


Books  in  General 

Blake,  as  a  mystic,  was  concentrated  upon  the 
supernatural.  He  disbelieved  in  the  evidence  of  the 
senses,  which,  as  Mr.  W.  M.  Rossetti  rotundly 
phrased  it,  he  considered  "  the  untrue  reporters 
about  ambiguous  simulacra,"  and  in  the  reliability  of 
human  reason. 

This  is  the  Spectre  of  Man:  the  Holy  Reasoning 

Power 
And  in  its  Holiness  is  closed  the  Abomination  of 

Desolation. 

He  held  that  "  the  only  real  science  is  art  "  and  his 
views  as  to  the  function  of  the  artist  are  very  clearly 
put  in  The  Marriage  of  Heaven  and  Hell: 

"  The  Prophets  Isaiah  and  Ezekiel  dined  with  me, 
and  I  asked  them  how  they  dared  so  roundly  to  as- 
sert that  God  spoke  to  them;  and  whether  they  did 
not  think  at  the  time  that  they  would  be  misunder- 
stood, and  so  be  the  cause  of  imposition. 

"  Isaiah  answer'd  'I  saw  no  God,  nor  heard  any, 
in  a  finite  organical  perception;  but  my  senses  dis- 
cover'd  the  infinite  in  everything,  and  as  I  was  then 
persuaded,  and  remain  confirm'd  that  the  voice  of 
honest  indignation  is  the  voice  of  God,  I  cared  not 
for  consequences,  but  wrote.' 

"  Then  I  asked:  '  Does  a  firm  persuasion  that  a 
thing  is  so,  make  it  so?  ' 

"He  replied:  'All  Poets  believe  that  it  does, 
and  in  ages  of  imagination  this  firm  persuasion  re- 
72 


Blake  and  His  Myths 

moved  mountains ;  but  many  are  not  capable  of  a  firm 
persuasion  of  anything.'  " 

But  it  is  clear  that  "  honest  indignation  "  will  fail  in 
its  effect  if  you  clothe  your  words  in  a  jargon  which 
prevents  mankind  from  knowing  what  you  are  in- 
dignant about  unless  it  sits  over  your  works  for  ten 
years  in  a  reference  library  with  wet  towels  round  its 
head.  Blake's  belief  that  his  words  were  inspired 
not  merely  in  general  purport,  but  verbally  and  lit- 
erally, almost  spoilt  him,  both  as  a  moral  propagan- 
dist, and  as  an  artist.  The  wonder  is  that  his  draw- 
ings, instead  of  being  the  definite  things  they  are,  are 
not  confused  jumbles  of  hands,  legs  and  eyes. 

It  is  one  of  the  greatest  tragedies  in  English  liter- 
ary history.  M.  Berger  fully  perceives  this,  though 
he  does  not  seem  adequately  to  appreciate  the  exqui- 
site musical  quality  that  Blake's  verse  had.  Blake, 
when  he  wrote  the  Songs  of  Innocence,  was  more 
simple  and  lucid  than  Wordsworth  at  his  simplest. 
When  he  was  making  causal  couplets  about  Cromek, 
Hayley,  and  his  other  bugbears,  he  could  be  equally 
clear.  His  address  to  the  fleshly  Rubens  is  almost 
Byronic: 

/  understood  Christ  was  a  carpenter 
And  not  a  brewer's  servant,  my  Good  Sir. 


and  there  are  many  epigrams  as  direct  as: 


73 


Books  in  General 

When  Sir  Joshua  Reynolds  died 

All  Nature  was  degraded; 

The  King  dropp'd  a  tear  into  the  Queen's  ear 

And  all  his  pictures  faded. 

and  that  on  the  painter  Cromek: 

A  nasty  sneaking  knave  I  knew. 
Oh,  Mr.   Cromek,  how  do  you  do? 

I  do  not  suggest,  of  course,  that  a  sack-full  of  such 
trifles  would  be  worth  the  Prophetic  Books.  But, 
at  any  rate,  one  can  understand  them  without  spend- 
ing the  best  part  of  one's  life  over  them,  and  they 
show  that  Blake  could  be  clear  enough  when  he  re- 
stricted the  sphere  of  his  operations.  But  in  the 
Prophetic  Books  he  had  bitten  off  the  Cosmos,  and  it 
was  more  than  he  could  chew. 

Had  Blake's  other  poetic  achievements  not  been 
so  great  it  is  probable  that  we  should  be  more  grate- 
ful for  the  chaotic  magnificences  of  the  Prophetic 
Books.  Had  he  exercised  great  influence  as  a  relig- 
ious teacher  and  an  enemy  of  mechanical  morality, 
his  labours  would  have  been  worth  while  even  had 
he  expressed  himself  in  the  baldest  and  most  ungram- 
matlcal  prose.  But  he  ceased  (save  In  places)  to  be 
a  readable  poet  without  becoming  an  audible 
prophet;  and  although  a  few  wrinkled  cognoscenti 
may  profess  to  be  Illumined  by  his  longer  works, 
most  people  will  continue  to  feel  that  the  angels  with 
whom  he  habitually  consorted  were  false  guides  and 
led  him  off  the  track. 
74 


Mutual  Compliments 

IF  any  one  Is  collecting  opinions  of  Swinburne 
he  should  not  miss  that  of  Walt  Whitman, 
given  by  Mr,  Ernest  Rhys  in  an  interesting 
chapter  of  reminiscences  which  appears  in  Today. 
Mr.  Rhys's  article  is  very  interesting  and  covers  a 
great  deal  of  ground.  He  describes  his  meetings 
with  James  Russell  Lowell,  whom  he  found  a  most 
agreeable  person;  and  he  has  a  good  many  memories 
of  the  lost,  but  not  much  lamented,  Rhymers'  Club. 
He  says  Mr.  Yeats  was  the  only  member  of  the  Club 
who  could  read  well,  and  that  Davidson  "  felt  him- 
self incomparably  greater  as  man  and  poet  than 
all  the  rest,"  and  described  himself  as  "  a  Pict  among 
the  Celts."  If  we  leave  Mr.  Yeats  out  of  consider- 
ation, I  think  Davidson  was  perfectly  right.  Dow- 
son,  and  even  Johnson,  could  not  compare  with  him, 
and  most  of  the  others  were  merely  ordinary  small 
fry.  But  that  is  a  side-issue;  what  I  wandered  away 
from  was  Whitman's  opinion  of  Swinburne.  Mr. 
Rhys  saw  Whitman  in  the  later  stages  of  his  "  par- 
alytic imprisonment."  He  talked  in  "  a  deep  mono- 
tone "  and  "  sat  still  as  a  statue."  "  Only  once  did 
he  appear  thoroughly  moved  out  of  himself.  A 
chance  reference  to  Swinburne  gave  the  provoking 
cue,  and  then  his  wrath  was  startling  to  behold.  He 
turned  quickly  in  his  seat,  with  an  angry  hand  lifted 

75 


Books  in  General 

from  the  usual  arm  of  the  chair,  and  in  vehement, 
oracular  voice  said:  '  Of  all  the  damned  simulacra 
I  have  ever  known  that  man  is  the  worst.  He 
brought  me  to  a  feast  —  the  table  spread  with  fine 
dishes,  but  when  I  lifted  off  the  covers,  lo  —  noth- 
ing was  there!  '  " 

I  do  not  remember  having  seen  this  before.  Per- 
haps it  was  the  rumour  of  some  such  utterance  which 
led  Swinburne,  after  writing  a  metrical  salute  to 
Whitman  as  the  "  good  grey  poet,"  to  compose  an 
essay  on  him  which  was  in  the  main  an  attack,  which 
suggested  that  he  was  obscene,  and  which  contained 
the  assertion  that  his  language  was  "  sometimes  that 
of  a  god"  (I  quote,  or  paraphrase,  from  memory) 
"  and  sometimes  that  of  a  drunken  apple-woman  roll- 
ing in  the  gutter."  A  similar  change  overwent  Swin- 
burne's opinion  of  WilHam  Bell  Scott,  the  Pre- 
Raphaelite.  He  dedicated  a  book  to  him  as  "  Poet 
and  Painter";  he  then  read  a  derogatory  reference 
to  himself  in  Scott's  letters;  and  Scott  at  once  became 
a  dauber  and  a  poetaster.  But  his  best  pronounce- 
ment on  some  one  he  believed  to  have  spoken  ill  of 
him  was  his  characterization  of  Emerson.  He  de- 
scribed that  extremely  amiable,  if  occasionally 
cloudy,  sage  as  "  a  wrinkled  and  toothless  baboon 
who,  having  been  first  hoisted  into  notoriety  on  the 
shoulders  of  Carlyle,  now  spits  and  splutters  on  a 
filthier  platform  of  his  own  framing  and  fouling." 


76 


Invective 

THIS  habit  of  rounded  Invective  is  not  one 
to  be  cultivated.  It  flourished  a  hundred 
years  ago;  it  is  almost  dead  now,  in  the 
limited  world  of  literature,  when  in  conversation  we 
are  content  to  call  a  man  a  windbag  or  a  pig,  and  in 
print  we  laugh  gently  at  or  sweetly  reason  with  even 
the  most  vociferous  of  fools  and  the  vainest  of  strut- 
ters. Reviewers,  at  one  time  the  most  offensive  of 
men,  have  now  become  so  mealy-mouthed  that  we  are 
frequently  at  a  loss  to  know  whether  they  consider  a 
book  magnificent  or  futile,  and  whether  they  consider 
its  author  a  reptile  or  the  torch-bearer  of  a  newer 
and  nobler  age.  This  is  carrying  it  a  little  too  far, 
though  there  is  nothing  to  regret  in  civility,  provided 
we  do  not  lose  the  courage  of  our  opinions;  but  there 
are  charms  about  abuse  when  the  persons  at  whom  it 
was  levelled  are  dead  and  beyond  being  hurt.  There 
is,  I  think,  room  for  an  Anthology  of  British  Invec- 
tive, in  prose  and  verse.  If  well  selected  it  would  be 
one  of  the  most  entertaining  and  generally  acceptable 
compilations  that  could  be  put  together  Moribund 
in  polite  letters,  ingenious  abuse  still  flourishes  in  the 
street.  Half  our  best  jokes  and  anecdotes  still  deal 
with  what  the  'bus  driver  said  to  his  rival  about  hiS 
face,  what  the  cab  driver  said  to  his  fare  about  his 
generosity,  and  allied  topics;  and  the  man  who  can 

77 


Books  in  General 

be  induced  to  smile  at  nothing  else  will  smile  at  a 
novel  form  of  vigorous  insult.  The  Anthology  of 
Invective  would  therefore  succeed. 

What  would  be  in  it?  I  see  several  sections.  In 
the  first  place  I  would  have  a  section  of  anecdotes, 
the  folklore  of  invective.  In  the  second  place  I 
would  have  a  section  of  political  invective.  Cob- 
bett's  works  are  full  of  wonderful  things  about  land- 
lords, cotton-spinners  and  clergymen;  his  Legacy  for 
Parsons  may  be  commended.  Milton  on  Salmasius 
would,  I  think,  yield  selections,  though  Milton  was 
rather  on  the  lofty  side.  Rebellion  and  Restoration 
literature  is  rich;  cf.  Cowley's  Essay  on  Cromwell  in 
which,  inter  alia,  he  accused  the  Protector  of  want- 
ing to  hand  over  St.  Paul's  Cathedral  to  the  Jews. 
The  Revolutionary  era  produced  a  very  large  crop; 
Lamb  on  the  Prince  of  Wales  and  the  Examiner  on 
the  same  subject  would  not  be  missing;  nor  Byron 
on  George  III;  nor  Byron  and  Shelley  on  Castle- 
reagh;  nor  a  famous  open  letter  of  Hazlitt's. 
From  Disraeli  many  admirable  specimens  could  be 
obtained;  Gladstone  on  the  Turks  reached  a  great 
height;  there  is  Lord  Randolph  Churchill  on  Glad- 
stone, Mr.  Maxse  on  everybody,  and  Mr.  Lloyd 
George  on  the  Dukes  —  a  subject  which  may  be 
barred  to  him  henceforth,  for  probably  half  of  his 
friends  will  ultimately  become  dukes.  Literary  and 
general  abuse  would  be  freely  provided  by  Swin- 
burne, by  the  old  Reviewers,  by  Christopher  North; 
we  should  have  Dr.  Johnson  on  the  Scotch,  James 
78 


Invective 

I  on  the  fraternity  of  Smokers,  and  half  the  Eliza- 
bethan authors  on  the  other  half.  Finally,  there  is 
the  enormous  body  of  English  satirical  poetry,  from 
Skelton  and  Bishop  Hall  to  Mr.  Belloc  and  Mr. 
Chesterton.  A  great  deal  of  it  is  scarcely  ever  read. 
People  may  dip  into  the  satires  of  Donne,  Marvell, 
Dryden,  Pope  and  Swift,  and  the  epigrams  of  Her- 
rick,  which  are  some  of  the  nastiest  if  not  the  neatest 
in  the  language.  But  the  gifted  vilifier  Charles 
Churchill  is  generally  ignored,  Oldham  is  barely  a 
name  to  many  voracious  readers,  and  the  enormous 
volume  of  Puritan  and  Cavalier  songs  (contained  in 
collections  like  Songs  of  the  Rump  and  the  State 
Poems)  might  well  be  introduced  by  extracts  to 
people  who  will  never  read  them  in  the  mass.  What 
is  the  most  drastic  piece  of  condemnation  in  the 
language  I  do  not  know.      Perhaps: 

Curse  the  people,  blast  the  people; 
Damn  the  lower  orders; 

is  more  comprehensive  and  sweeping  than  most;  but 
that  is  by  Ebenezer  Eliot  and  written  ironically. 
For  searching  subtlety  I  think  that  Pope  on  Atticus 
holds  the  field.  I  look  forward  to  enlightenment 
from  some  one  more  expert  from  whom,  in  pious 
hope,  I  await  The  Thousand  Best  Insults,  A  Posy  of 
Invective,  or  The  Oxford  Book  of  English  Denun- 
ciation and  Abuse.  If  nobody  else  does  it  in  the 
meantime  and  I  survive  the  shocks  of  the  modern 
Honours  Lists,  I  shall  probably  solace  my  own  old 

79 


Books  in  General 

age  with  that  labour  of  love,  thus  bringing  a  well- 
spent  life  of  action  to  a  serene  and  sunny  close.  But 
I  would  rather  somebody  else  did  this  —  and  every 
other  job  as  well. 


80 


A  Picture  of  Chaos 

DURING  the  war  Mr.  Seeker  published  an 
English  version  of  Artzybasheff's  Sanine. 
This  book  had  a  tremendous  success  in  Ger- 
many and  Russia.  And,  as  a  document,  it  is  well 
worth  studying  here.  For  —  leaving  out  of  consid- 
eration its  qualities  as  a  well-written  story,  which 
are  considerable  —  it  has  a  treble  interest.  It  dis- 
cusses "  sex-problems  "  with  unusual  honesty,  if  the 
usual  inconclusiveness  of  books  by  people  who  have 
abandoned  authority.  It  gives  a  vivid  picture,  with- 
in certain  limitations,  of  Russian  life,  especially  as 
lived  by  intellectuals  in  the  despairing  times  after  the 
failure  of  the  Revolution.  And  it  reflects  the  welter 
of  thoughts  and  aspirations  which  are  common  to  the 
whole  contemporary  Western  world.  Mr.  Gilbert 
Cannan's  preface  suggests  that  M.  Artzybasheff's 
onslaught  against  sex-taboos,  sexual  repression,  and 
sexual  hypocrisy  is  at  once  the  principal  purpose  and 
the  principal  justification  of  the  book.  This  does 
not  appear  to  me  to  be  true.  The  author  is  cer- 
tainly preoccupied,  not  with  sex,  but  with  our  ideas 
about  sex;  but  these  ideas  are  merely  one  company 
in  a  larger  host  of  ideas  about  life  as  a  whole,  and 
he  is  equally  interested  in  them  all.  He  takes  a 
group  of  typical  young  men  and  women  who  have 
lost   the   support   of   traditional   ideas   on   religion, 

8i 


Books  in  General 

politics,  and  morals,  and  who  are  crippled  by  their 
inability  to  discover  an  object  in  Man  or  the  Uni- 
verse, or  a  code  by  which  they  can  live  both  happily 
and  conscientiously.  He  shows  the  confusion  of 
thought  and  the  lamentable  results  of  that  confusion. 
And  he  presents  no  solution. 

His  own  thought  appears  to  be  as  distracted  and 
uncertain  as  that  of  his  characters.  Presumably  he 
is  aware  of  that.  For  he  cannot  really  have  consid- 
ered Sanine  himself  as  a  solution.  Sanine  is  a  sort 
of  Superman:  big  and  blond,  though  not  quite  a  beast. 
He  has  gone  through  the  usual  ideals  of  the  sensi- 
tive intellectual  and  has  come  out  completely  self-re- 
liant and  self-contained.  At  the  beginning  of  the 
book  he  returns  alone  to  the  provincial  town  where 
his  mother  and  sister  live;  for  he  likes  change,  and, 
as  he  says,  "  As  long  as  one  hasn't  found  people  out, 
there  is  always  a  chance  that  they  may  prove  in- 
teresting." He  remains  there  a  spectator  of  the 
lives  of  the  family  and  of  the  local  intellectuals. 
Now  and  then  he  intervenes  in  the  action.  He  pre- 
vents —  after  some  hesitation  —  his  sister  from 
committing  suicide  when  she  has  been  seduced  and 
left  in  the  lurch  by  a  libidinous  officer.  Later  he  has 
a  short  amour  with  a  friend's  fiancee,  who  momen- 
tarily accepts  his  view  that  an  hour's  sensual  enjoy- 
ment in  the  moonlight  is  a  casual  thing  which  may  be 
looked  back  upon  with  pure  and  elevated  pleasure, 
and  not  with  regret,  provided  one  can  clear  one's 
mind  of  absurd  preconceptions.  But  usually  he  is 
82 


A  Picture  of  Chaos 

merely  watching  the  antics  of  the  imperfectly  emanci- 
pated people  around  him.  "  There's  an  old  hen  for 
you  !  "  he  muses  detachedly,  as  he  looks  at  his  bigoted 
old  mother  strutting  across  the  room.  Deaths  and 
suicides,  which  occur  in  profusion,  leave  him  merely 
mildly  regretting  people's  folly.  For  he  alone  has 
his  simple  creed : 

"  '  What  is  the  good  of  living?  '  asked  Yourii. 

"  '  One  thing  I  know,'  replied  Sanine,  '  and  that 
is  that  I  don't  want  my  life  to  be  a  miserable  one. 
Thus,  before  all  things,  one  must  satisfy  one's  nat- 
ural desires.   .   .   .' 

"  '  But  his  desires  may  be  evil.' 

"  '  Possibly.' 

'"But  what  then?' 

"  '  Then  .  .  .  they  must  just  be  evil,'  replied 
Sanine  blandly." 

The  Yourii  who  is  the  interlocutor  here  is  the 
most  real  character  in  the  book.  Sanine  himself  is 
Impossible.  If  he  were  possible,  he  would  be  loath- 
some —  the  worst  of  fiction  is  that  the  novelist  can 
give  a  man  qualities  never  found  together  —  what- 
ever M.  Artzybasheff  may  say.  But  he  does  not 
even  appear  complete.  He  is  rather  a  section  of  a 
character,  the  embodiment  of  an  impulse  present  in 
everybody  and  of  a  train  of  thought  that  runs 
through  everybody's  mind  —  for,  presumably,  every 
man  who  ever  thinks  at  all  sometimes  wildly  con- 
ceives of  himself  as  throwing  aside  all  ties  and  re- 
straints and  striding  through  life,  a  law  to  himself, 

'    83 


Books  in  General 

like  a  calm,  statuesque  god  with  a  bunch  of  forked 
lightnings  in  his  clenched  hand.  The  conception  of 
unfettered  individualism  —  even  with  Godwin's  little 
postulate  of  universal  benevolence  worked  in  — 
won't  provide  either  a  modus  vivendi  for  one  indi- 
vidual or  a  panacea  for  social  ills;  but  as  a  person- 
ification of  the  modern  revolt  against  the  blind  ac- 
ceptance of  formulae  and  against  the  fear  of  acting 
according  to  one's  own  lights,  Sanine  is  interesting 
enough,  Yourii,  however,  is  a  complete  character, 
who  is  to  be  met  in  England  as  well  as  in  Russia. 

Yourii  is  an  intellectual  and  an  artist  who  has 
been  mixed  up  with  the  Socialist  movement.  He  is 
disgusted  with  the  slowness  of  progress,  the  strength 
of  embattled  authority,  the  inertia  of  the  pro- 
letariat; and  he  relapses  into  a  chronic  state  of  self- 
questioning.  He  doubts  the  use  of  anything,  and 
he  doubts  the  sincerity  of  himself.  He  finds  self- 
indulgence  at  the  root  of  his  romanticism,  and  ambi- 
tion at  the  root  of  his  political  activities.  He  goes 
about  trying  to  get  others  to  answer  the  questions 
he  cannot  answer  himself.  When  he  addresses  to 
Ivanoff,  Sanine's  blunt  and  brutal  disciple,  an  en- 
quiry as  to  where  happiness  is  to  be  sought,  he  is 
given  a  very  good  indication  of  his  own  character  in 
reply: 

"  '  Well,  most  assuredly  not  in  perpetual  sighing 
and  groaning,  or  incessant  questionings  such  as  "  I 
sneezed  just  now.  Was  that  the  right  thing  to 
84 


A  Picture  of  Chaos 

do?  Will  It  not  cause  harm  to  some  one?  Have 
I,  in  sneezing,  fulfilled  my  destiny?  "  '  " 

With  domestic  happiness,  at  all  events,  at  his  door, 
he  questions  himself  until,  desperate  for  want  of  "  a 
working  hypothesis,"  he  kills  himself.  His  death  is 
as  hesitating  and  feeble  as  his  life ;  but  he  is  attractive 
and  very  vivid.  The  minor  characters  —  Lida, 
Karsavina,  Semenoff,  Sarudine,  Captain  von  Dietz 
(the  military  Tolstoyan),  and  others  —  are  equally 
convincing,  as  individuals  and  as  types;  and  the  land- 
scape background  is  cleverly  touched  in.  There  is 
no  attempt  at  painting  more  than  the  life  of  a  set, 
or  rather  the  spare  time  of  a  set.  The  labouring 
classes  scarcely  appear  — -  save  as  represented  by 
two  shy  individuals  at  a  futile,  smoky  and  beery 
revolutionary  meeting  in  a  studio  —  and  we  are  not 
convinced,  though  we  are  told,  that  various  of  the 
persons  really  earn  their  living  by  working  all  day. 
But  M.  Artzybasheff  has  got  the  intellectual  chaos 
on  paper,  and  has  made  it  pathetic;  and  that  is  a 
considerable  thing  to  have  done.  Nevertheless,  if 
the  Western  World  doesn't  get  out  of  that  chaos 
it  is  all  up  with  us. 


85 


Shelley's  Letters 


MR.  ROGER  INGPEN'S  edition  of  Shel- 
ley's Letters  has  now  been  published  in 
two  volumes  of  Bohn's  Standard  Library. 
It  is  a  model  edition.  It  first  appeared,  many  new 
letters  being  included,  in  1909;  there  was  a  second 
edition  in  191 1  with  much  additional  matter;  there 
is  one  new  letter  in  the  present  edition,  and  there  is 
good  reason  to  believe  that  the  editor  has  further 
unpublished  letters  in  prospect.  In  all  there  are  486 
letters  in  the  Bohn  edition,  which  runs  to  over  a 
thousand  pages;  and  there  are  also  ample  notes,  a 
stupendous  index  and  a  very  full  biographical  ac- 
count of  Shelley's  correspondents.  The  earliest 
letter  was  written  before  the  poet  reached  his 
eleventh  birthday  and  the  last  dates  from  just  be- 
fore his  death.  Although  there  are  good  books  on 
Shelley  no  one  can  get  a  thoroughly  sound  idea  of 
what  he  was  like  without  reading  the  letters  bodily. 
One  still  finds  people  who,  bewildered  by  the  lofty 
nebulosities  of  Proinetheus  and  The  JVitch  of  Atlas 
and  Epipsychidion,  hold  Matthew  Arnold's  view  of 
the  "beautiful  ineffectual  angel";  and  others  who 
prefer  to  think  of  him  as  a  "  beautiful  angel  "  with 
the  "  ineffectual  "  left  out.  A  selection  of  the  more 
ethereal  poems  might  well  generate  such  an  opinion; 
but  no  one  can  read  through  the  letters  without 
86 


Shelley's  Letters 

realizing  that  Shelley  was  ultimately  a  reasonable 
being.  People  forget  how  young  he  was  when  he 
committed  the  acts  that  they  regard  as  most  typical 
of  him. 

He  married  .Harriet  Westbrook  and  deserted 
her;  he  attempted  to  convert  the  University  of  Ox- 
ford to  an  open  Atheism;  he  set  libertarian  mes- 
sages adrift  In  bottles  on  the  turbulent  waves  of  the 
Bristol  Channel;  and,  from  a  balcony  in  Dublin,  he 
attempted  to  stimulate  the  depressed  spirits  of  Irish 
patriots.  There  was  something  of  the  beautiful,  be- 
wildered Ineffectual  about  all  these  things;  but  it  Is 
dangerous  to  forget  that  they  were  all  over  and 
done  with  before  Shelley  came  of  age.  Certain 
characteristics  in  him  persisted.  The  Shelley  who 
at  eighteen  wrote  "  In  justice  to  myself  I  must  also 
declare  that  a  proof  of  his  existence,  or  even  the 
divine  mission  of  Christ,  would  in  no  manner  alter 
one  idea  on  the  subject  of  morality  "  was  the  per- 
manent, indestructible  Shelley.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  man  who,  ten  years  after,  wrote  ''  Epipsy- 
chidion  I  cannot  look  at.  .  .  .  It  is  an  idealized 
history  of  my  life  and  feelings.  I  think  one  is  al- 
ways in  love  with  something  or  other;  the  error,  and 
I  confess  it  is  not  easy  for  spirits  cased  in  flesh  and 
blood  to  avoid  it,  consists  in  seeking  in  a  mortal 
image  the  likeness  of  what  is  perhaps  eternal  "  was 
a  man  whom  experience  had  changed.  There  is  a 
tendency  to  telescope  Shelley's  career  in  a  manner 
which   would   have    been    impossible   had   he    lived 

87 


Books  in  General 

longer,  and  which  ignores  the  fact  that  he  developed. 
The  most  matter-of-fact  letters  in  these  volumes 
will,  perhaps,  for  this  reason,  be  to  many  the  most 
illuminating.  "  I  write  little  now,"  he  says  at 
twenty-nine,  to  John  Gisborne.  "  It  is  impossible 
to  compose  except  under  the  strong  excitement  of  an 
assurance  of  finding  sympathy  in  what  you  write." 
This  letter  to  his  agents  might  well  shock  those 
who  see  in  Shelley  merely  a  Sensitive  Plant: 

"Gentlemen, —  The  parcel  arrived  safe,  contain- 
ing most  of  the  books  of  the  original  order. 

"  I  wish  any  edition  of  Quintus  Curtius,  which 
is  not  extremely  dear,  and  which  contains  the  supple- 
ment of  Freinhemius,  to  be  sent  as  early  as  con- 
venient. 

"  Your  obedient  servant, 

"P.  B.  Shelley." 

And  Mr.  Ingpen  even  reproduces  in  facsimile  a  per- 
fectly orderly  letter  from  Shelley  to  his  bankers. 
He  did  not  live  on  air. 

The  letters  are  some  of  the  best  reading  in  the 
language.  Only  Byron's,  Cowper's,  Gray's  and 
Horace  Walpole's  can  compete  with  them.  And  in 
no  collection  of  letters  that  we  possess  is  so  fine  a 
human  spirit  revealed.  There  are  faults.  The 
early  letters  are,  being  early,  immature;  and  they 
have  an  engagingly  naive  pomposity.  Some  of  the 
letters  from  abroad  describing  scenery  are,  though 


Shelley's  Letters 

extraordinarily  good,  rather  over-written.  In  the 
earher  letters  there  is  also  a  certain  lack  of  bal- 
ance; the  transmutation  of  Miss  Elizabeth  Hitch- 
ener  from  a  goddess  into  a  Brown  Demon  (she  was 
probably  an  ordinary  irritating  prig  and  ass)  is 
amusingly  rapid.  But  the  grown  Shelley  is  almost 
always  not  merely  natural,  generous,  self-sacrificing, 
and  a  slave  to  his  ideals,  but  also  extremely  sensible. 
It  is  possible  to  present  the  skeleton  of  his  life  in 
such  a  form  as  to  make  him  look  like  an  erratic 
fanatic;  but  it  is  not  possible  for  any  one  who  goes 
farther  into  it  to  think  of  him  as  that. 


89 


On  Cleaning  Books 

A  CORRESPONDENT    writes    to    ask    me 
"  how  Solomon  Eagle  cleans  his  books," 
when  they  are  "  foxed,"  etc.     The  answer 
is  that  he  doesn't. 

Sometimes  I  look  at  my  old  books,  and,  lo !  they 
are  very  dirty.  I  then  take  one  of  two  courses. 
If  the  book  is  valuable,  and  its  condition  does  not 
make  it  past  praying  for,  I  send  it  to  a  firm  of  bind- 
ers and  cleaners,  who  eliminate  stains,  put  invisible 
patches  on  corners,  gild  edges,  fill  up  holes,  and 
cleanse  paper  until  it  is  whiter  than  snow.  They 
then  send  me  in  a  bill  for  several  pounds,  and  for 
ever  afterwards  I  have  a  violent  aversion  from  the 
book  and  call  it  a  white  elephant. 

This  happens  seldom  and,  until  I  have  rescued 
that  rich  old  lady  from  the  hoofs  of  a  cab-horse,  it 
will  happen  still  less  frequently  in  the  future. 
More  usually  it  is  the  second  course  I  adopt.  I  find 
myself  regretting  that  a  page  is  "  foxed,"  ink- 
stained,  or  defaced  by  the  tea,  coffee  or  butter  of  a 
bygone  generation  which  had  not  lived  to  learn  the 
really  economical  use  of  those  commodities.  All 
my  convictions  about  the  futility  of  modern  men 
who  can  do  nothing  for  themselves  rise  in  my  mind; 
90 


On  Cleaning  Books 

"  I  will  prove  myself  practical,"  I  say,  "  and  do  the 
job  myself."  I  then  resort  to  Mr.  Aldis's  The 
Printed  Book,  to  the  Encyclopaedia,  to  Mr.  Slater's 
Hozv  to  Collect  Books,  to  Hill  Burton's  The  Book- 
Hunter,  and  sundry  other  works  of  reference  in 
search  of  information  which  some  of  them  give.  I 
then  find  that  paraffin-wax,  benzol,  acetylanilide, 
trinitritoluol  or  some  such  thing  is  wanted;  and  I 
have  none  in  the  house.  I  also  find  that  time,  care, 
patience  and  kindred  terrifying  abstractions  are 
necessary;  and  I  am  equally  lacking  in  them.  The 
upshot  of  it  is  that  I  put  the  book  back  where  it 
came  from,  consoling  myself  with  the  reflection  that 
this  mania  for  renovation  and  refurbishing  is  the 
disease  of  an  age  at  once  too  commercial  and  too 
fastidious.  Does  a  little  "  foxing"  matter?  Why 
should  not  a  book  have  a  few  brown  spots  on  it? 
Is  there  not  a  charm  in  the  stains  left  by  owners 
long  ago  in  their  graves?  Are  not  the  tea,  the  ink 
and  the  butter  which  the  centuries  have  brought 
to  the  book  an  equivalent  to  the  mellow  colours  and 
the  quiet  vegetation  which  come,  with  antiquity,  to 
men's  houses  —  a  sort  of  compensation  to  the  book 
for  its  inability  (unless  it  is  kept  in  a  very  wet  place) 
to  grow  moss?  Why  should  one  want  a  book  three 
hundred  years  old  to  look  like  one  newly  emerged 
from  Henrietta  Street  or  St.  Martin's  Lane?  We 
do  not  go  round  washing  tombstones  with  soap  and 
water,  we  do  not  cast  away  oak-panelling  because 
it  is  getting  black;  we  do  not  fit  an  ancient  statue 
with  a  new  nose.     A  soiled  and  torn  book  is  a  small 

91 


Books  in  General 

chapter  of  history.  Hold  this  charm  in  your  hand 
and  it  provokes  to  dreams;  the  dry  bones  stir  and 
take  flesh,  one  traverses  the  ages  and  sees  the  life 
of  them;  every  stain  becomes  a  tear  and  every 
scrawl  a  signature.  How,  after  such  reflections, 
could  one  go  out  to  the  chemist  to  buy  2  oz.  of  trini- 
tritoluol?  If  he  were  a  chymist  and  the  bottle  a 
phial  it  might  be  a  little  more  in  keeping.  I  will 
leave  the  book  as  it  is. 

So  I  am  afraid  I  cannot  help  my  correspondent 
beyond  referring  him  to  the  books  and  the  book- 
binders. They  know,  they  know.  Myself,  I  have 
never  cleaned  a  book  in  my  life,  beyond  erasing 
pencil-marks  with  india-rubber,  pen-marks  with  the 
ossiform  remains  of  the  cuttlefish,  and  publishers' 
embossed  stamps  with  a  knife-handle,  rubbed  very 
hard.  Only  two  things  have  I  learnt  and  practised 
about  the  physical  well-being  of  books;  and  these 
are,  how  to  get  rid  of  bookworms  and  how  to  clean 
bindings. 

Bookworms,  though  undoubtedly  traditional 
things  and  the  accompaniment  of  venerable  age,  I 
cannot  commend  and  do  not  wish  to  preserve. 
These  tiny  bradawls  go  clean  through  leather,  much 
more  paper;  and  if  they  are  allowed  to  run  loose 
they  may  end  by  destroying  the  legibility  of  the  text, 
which,  after  all,  is  an  integral  part  of  the  book.  Be- 
ing once  harassed  by  them,  I  systematically  read 
them  up.  There  were  large  pictures  of  them,  by  no 
92 


On  Cleaning  Books 

means  alluring;  their  mandibles,  legs  and  nervous 
systems  were  accurately  described;  their  names  (like 
those  of  so  many  insects,  Latin  ones)  were  written 
out  at  length.  But  I  found  that  no  one  could  give 
me  the  only  information  I  wanted.  I  hadn't  the 
least  curiosity  about  how  they  lived;  I  wanted  to 
know  how  they  died.  But  no  one  could  tell  me. 
All  the  experts  could  do  was  say,  doubtfully,  that 
such  and  such  a  chemical  had  been  tried  with  some 
success;  and  that  they  were  believed  to  languish  and 
lose  much  of  their  appetite  if  dosed  with  such  and 
such  another.  I  gave  them  all  the  chemicals  that 
the  heart  of  bug  could  desire.  The  more  chemicals 
they  ate,  the  more  paper  they  ate:  it  was  as  if  they 
made  sandwiches  with  them  and  found  the  sand- 
wiches unprecedentedly  appetizing.  In  the  end  I 
met  a  man  who  said  that  bookworms  liked  damp, 
and  that  they  consequently  throve  on  a  clay  soil.  I 
therefore  moved  house  and  they  disappeared. 

The  cleaning  of  bindings  I  found  equally  simple, 
though  I  do  not  profess  to  get  more  than  amateur 
results.  There  are  limits  to  one's  veneration  for 
dirt;  and  a  quarter  of  an  Inch  of  ancient  filth  on  a 
back,  originally  of  white  vellum,  is  a  little  more 
than  the  coarsest  of  us  can  comfortably  stand.  All 
kinds  of  things  were  recommended  me,  but  In  the 
end  I  found  that  a  little  paraffin  worked  very  well 
on  ordinary  calf  —  on  the  labels  as  well  If  one  did 
not  apply  so  freely  or  rub  so  hard  as  to  get  the 
colour  off.     And  for  vellum  backs  soap  and  milk; 

93 


Books  in  General 

though  at  the  present  moment,  with  a  world-short- 
age about,  I  had  better  express  my  long  held  con- 
viction that  there  really  cannot  be  any  mystic  virtue 
which  milk  possesses  and  water  lacks.  Take  a 
black  or  dark  grey  vellum  binding.  Take  a  rag. 
Take  some  soap.  Take  a  saucer  of  the  liquid. 
Moisten  the  rag  with  the  liquid,  rub  it  on  the  soap, 
and  then  apply  to  cover,  and  a  little  exercise  will 
show  you  —  what  you  can  scarcely  have  guessed  be- 
fore —  what  the  cover  was  originally  like.  The 
time  taken  to  do  the  job  properly  I  should  assess 
at  a  full  day  for  ten  large  volumes.  Unless  you 
are  a  person  of  leisure  you  will  end,  as  one  usually 
does  when  one  has  mown  grass,  mended  a  lock, 
put  up  a  fowl-house  or  done  anything  else  for  one- 
self, by  wondering  whether  it  wouldn't  have  paid 
better  to  employ  somebody  in  the  trade.  And  that, 
finally,  is  the  best  advice  I  can  give  to  my  corres- 
pondent about  all  such  things. 


94 


The  Essay  in  America 

THE  Oxford  University  Press  has  done  an 
interesting  thing  in  issuing  an  Oxford 
Book  of  American  Essays.  It  is  not  im- 
plied that,  on  the  whole,  there  is  much  to  distin- 
guish American  from  English  essays,  or  that  the 
best  essays  in  the  book  might  not  equally  well  be 
included  in  an  anthology  of  English  essays.  As  the 
editor.  Professor  Brander  Matthews,  remarks, 
"  Just  as  Alexandrian  literature  is  Greek,  so  Ameri- 
can literature  is  English."  What  is  more,  Ameri- 
can essay-writers  have,  on  the  whole,  kept  perhaps  a 
closer  contact  with  the  English  tradition  of  style, 
language,  and  form  than  any  other  class  of  Ameri- 
can writers.  The  earlier  essayists  —  Irving,  for 
example,  and  Dana  —  might  quite  well  have  been 
Englishmen,  as  far  as  their  essays  betray  them.  As 
one  goes  on  a  peculiarly  American  turn  of  speech 
or  humour  comes  in  occasionally;  but  our  contem- 
porary John  Burroughs,  with  his  Idyl  of  the 
Honey-Bee,  might  be  own  brother  to  Richard  Jef- 
ferles;  and  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  himself,  in  the  very 
process  of  protesting  against  Colonialism  in  the 
United  States,  demands  a  native  Kultur  in  the 
phrases  and  periods  of,  say,  the  Times  Literary 
Supplement. 

95 


Books  in  General 

But  It  was  worth  publishing  the  book  here,  firstly 
because  many  of  the  lesser,  but  nevertheless  quite 
interesting,  American  essayists  here  included  would 
be  crowded  out  of  a  more  general  collection,  and 
secondly  as  a  demonstration  of  the  strength  of 
American  literature  in  this  particular  department. 
Even  in  a  more  general  way  we  rather  tend,  as  a 
rule,  to  under-estimate  the  American  literature  of 
the  nineteenth  century  because  of  our  automatic 
habit  of  mentally  comparing  it  with  the  rich  con- 
temporaneous "  outputs "  (I  apologize  for  this 
word)  of  England  and  France.  As  Professor  Mat- 
thews remarks,  "  although  American  literature  has 
not  been  adorned  by  so  great  a  galaxy  of  brilliant 
names  as  illumined  British  literature  in  the  nine- 
teenth century,  it  has  had  the  good  fortune  to 
possess  more  authors  of  cosmopolitan  fame  than 
can  be  found  in  the  German  literature  of  the  past 
hundred  years,  in  the  Itahan,  or  in  the  Spanish." 
And  the  essayists  of  the  U.S.A.  have  done  abnor- 
mally well. 

The  selection  is  very  comprehensive.  Franklin, 
Irving,  Emerson,  Hawthorne,  Poe,  O.  W.  Holmes, 
Thoreau,  Lowell,  Walt  Whitman,  are  represented, 
as  well  as  Henry  James,  W.  D.  Howells,  Thomas 
Wentworth  Higginson,  Hamilton  Wright  Mabie, 
Samuel  McChord  Crothers,  and  Theodore  Roose- 
velt. Mr.  Roosevelt's  contribution  is  not  very  in- 
spired, perhaps:  an  earnest  plea  for  Whitman  and 
even  Futurism  based  on  a  study  of  Dante. 
96 


The  Essay  in  America 

"  Dante's  masterpiece  is  one  of  the  supreme  works 
of  art  that  the  ages  have  witnessed;  but  he  would 
have  been  the  last  to  wish  that  it  should  be  treated 
only  as  a  work,  of  art,  or  worshipped  only  for  art's 
sake,  without  reference  to  the  dread  lessons  it 
teaches  mankind."  A  good  many  of  the  essays, 
English  enough  in  expression,  are  local  in  reference: 
the  book  shows  the  general,  and  not  inexcusable, 
American  traits  of  self-consciousness  and  self- 
comparison  with  other  peoples.  Sense  on  the 
subjects  of  Americanism  in  Literature  is  to  be  found 
in  Higginson's  essay:  he  was  anxious  that  Americans 
should  be  American,  but  he  pointed  out  that  "origi- 
nality is  simply  a  fresh  pair  of  eyes,"  and  that  the 
deliberate  constrained  effort  to  be  American  was  as 
useless  as  the  effort  to  be  French  or  German.  Es- 
says of  this  serious  kind  are  frequent  in  the  book, 
and  depend  rather  on  their  matter  than  on  their 
manner  for  their  effect.  But  one  need  not  cavil  at 
their  inclusion,  for  it  is  a  large  book  and  its  contents 
range  from  Franklin's  pathetic  Dialogue  on  the  Gout 
and  Irving's  Lambishly  meditative  reflections  on 
mutability  at  Westminster  to  Poe's  highly  technical 
account  of  how  he  wrote  The  Raven.  No  purist 
would  accept  this  as  an  essay,  though  it  is  of  normal 
essay  length.  But  it  is  an  extraordinarily  fascinat- 
ing and  subtle  piece  of  work  and  one  of  the  few  ac- 
counts we  have  of  the  genesis  of  a  work  of  art  in  the 
artist's  brain.  Whether  it  is  entirely  accurate  one 
does  not  know ;  he  may  have  laid  it  on  a  little  bru- 
tally to  shock  the  sentimental  when  he   explained 

97 


Books  in  General 

how  he  started  with  an  idea  of  making  an  impres- 
sion of  Beauty;  how  melancholy  seemed  the  most 
useful  tone  to  adopt;  how  a  refrain  seemed  the 
quickest  way  of  getting  the  atmosphere;  how 
"Never  more"  was  selected  as  the  best  refrain; 
how  a  non-reasoning  speaker  of  the  refrain  was  de- 
cided on  to  avoid  monotony;  how  his  first  notion  as 
to  the  speaker  required  was  not  a  raven,  but  a  par- 
rot; and  how  the  climax  was  written  first.  If  he 
had  selected  a  parrot,  the  poem  would  probably 
have  had  a  different  complexion,  though  his  power 
was  so  great  that  he  might  even  have  made  a  green- 
and-red  Polly  an  emblem  and  oracle  of  tragic  doom. 

Turning  over  casually,  I  came  upon  Wendell 
Holmes'  Bread  and  the  Newspaper,  in  great  part  an 
analysis  of  national  and  individual  feelings  in  time 
of  war:  the  nervous  restlessness,  the  inability  to 
read  the  normal  things,  and  so  on.  "  Another  most 
eminent  scholar,"  he  says,  "  told  us  in  all  simplicity 
that  he  had  fallen  into  such  a  state  that  he  would 
read  the  same  telegraphic  dispatches  over  and  over 
again  in  different  papers,  as  if  they  were  new,  until 
he  felt  as  if  he  were  an  idiot."  Time  has  not  mod- 
ified the  human  mind  here;  and  I  noticed  in  myself 
a  quickened  interest  in  all  the  references  in  these 
essays  to  England,  Germany,  or  war.  New  life  and 
force  is  given  to  Lowell's  remark, 

"  Pachydermatous  Deutschland,  covered  with 
trophies  from  every  field  of  letters,  still  winces 
98 


The  Essay  in  America 

under  that  question  which  Pere  Bouhours  put  two 
centuries  ago,  Si  tin  Allemande  pent  etre  bel- 
esprit?" 

Lowell  did  not,  however,  reserve  his  Investigations 
for  the  Germans.  A  little  farther  on  one  comes  to  a 
story  of  an  Englishman : 

"  During  the  Civil  War  an  English  gentleman  of 
highest  description  was  kind  enough  to  call  upon  me, 
mainly,  as  it  seemed,  to  inform  me  how  entirely  he 
sympathized  with  the  Confederates,  and  how  sure 
he  felt  that  we  would  never  subdue  them  —  '  they 
were  the  gentlemen  of  the  country,  you  know.'  " 

One  whole  essay  is  given  up  to  us.  It  Is  Irving's 
John  Bull.  It  is  rather  sentimental,  and  his  accept- 
ance of  the  conventional  Bull  as  the  typical  English- 
man would  be  even  less  justified  now  than  it  was 
then.  But  he  appends  to  his  description  of  old 
manor-houses,  old  dependants,  old  wine,  portliness, 
quick  anger,  ancestral  elms,  etc.,  a  certain  amount 
of  criticism.  He  had  his  views  on  our  chronic  de- 
sire (as  he  sees  It)  to  volunteer  our  services  to  set- 
tle our  neighbour's  affairs: 

"  He  cannot  hear  of  a  quarrel  between  the  most 
distant  of  his  neighbours,  but  he  begins  incontinently 
to  fumble  with  the  head  of  his  cudgel,  and  consider 
whether  his  interest  or  honour  does  not  require  that 
he  should  meddle  In  the  broil.     Indeed  he  has  ex- 

99 


Books  in  General 

tended  his  relations  of  pride  and  policy  so  com- 
pletely over  the  whole  country,  that  no  event  can 
take  place  without  infringing  some  of  his  finely  spun 
rights  and  dignities.  Couched  in  his  little  domain, 
with  these  filaments  stretching  forth  in  every  direc- 
tion, he  is  like  some  choleric  bottle-bellied  old  spider, 
who  has  woven  his  web  over  a  whole  chamber,  so 
that  a  fly  cannot  buzz,  nor  a  breeze  blow,  without 
startling  his  repose,  and  causing  him  to  sally  forth 
wrathfully  from  his  den. 

My  country,  'tis  of  thee !  But  'tis  affectionately 
spoken. 


lOO 


The  Prices  of  Restoration 
Books 

A  YEAR  or  two  ago,  when  discussing  book- 
auction  prices,  I  suggested  that  sixteenth 
and  early  seventeenth  century  books  had 
now  been  so  thoroughly  explored,  and  had  reached 
such  high  prices,  that  collectors  would  be  driven  on 
to  the  Restoration  and  Queen  Anne  and  Georgian 
periods.  You  have  to  pay  many  pounds  for  a  good 
copy  of  any  minor  Elizabethan  versifier,  your  Her- 
rick  may  cost  you  £130,  and  the  market  has  been  so 
thoroughly  ransacked  for  these  early  books  that  the 
excitement  of  the  chase  has  almost  disappeared  from 
their  collection.  I  also  pointed  out  that  the  work 
of  scholarship  on  authors  from  Spenser  and  Mar- 
lowe to  Suckling  and  Vaughan  had  been  pretty 
thoroughly  done,  although  no  doubt  many  puzzles 
remain  unsolved  and  there  is  still  ample  room  for 
the  operations  of  the  textual  critic.  Scholars, 
therefore,  as  well  as  collectors,  must  inevitably  be 
pushed  onwards  to  another  period  —  a  period,  no 
doubt,  poor  in  the  highest  classes  of  literary  produc- 
tion, but  still  interesting  and  offering  an  enormous 
field  for  research.  Mr.  P.  J.  Dobell  has  apparently 
come  to  similar  conclusions:  his  recent  catalogue  of 
Poetical  and  Dramatic  Literature  produced  between 

lOI 


Books  in  General 

the  years  1660  and  1700  is  the  first  attempt  I  have 
seen  to  cover  the  field.  "  I  do  not  think,"  he  says, 
"  any  work  exists  from  which  a  general  view  of  the 
activities  of  the  poets  and  playrights  of  the  last 
forty  years  of  the  seventeenth  century  can  be  ob- 
tained." His  catalogue  is  an  endeavour  to  provide 
such  a  work.  It  has,  obviously,  one  great  limita- 
tion. Like  that  old,  but  still  useful,  book  Anglo- 
Poetica,  it  is  a  bookseller's  catalogue.  That  is, 
nothing  can  be  included  unless  Mr.  Dobell  has  a  copy 
for  sale.  Even  so  almost  every  author  of  any  im- 
portance appears,  and  the  twelve  hundred  "  titles  " 
include  a  large  number  of  rare  and  obscure  works. 
There  are  a  few  conspicuous  omissions;  as,  for  in- 
stance, that  mysterious  and  passionate  Ephelia  about 
whom  Mr.  Gosse  wrote  an  essay  long  ago;  and 
Philip  Ayres,  who  may  be  regarded  as  the  very  last 
of  the  Elizabethans  and  published  a  volume  called 
Lyric  Poems  in  1687.  But  Ephelia  is  a  rare  author, 
as,  having  vainly  looked  for  a  copy  of  her  works  for 
years,  I  have  reason  to  know.  If  a  complete  list  of 
missing  editions  were  to  be  compiled  it  would  be 
many  times  longer  than  Mr.  Dobell's.  Neverthe- 
less, his  catalogue  will  be  of  immense  use  as  a  sup- 
plement to  the,  in  this  department,  very  inadequate 
Lowndes. 

There  is  no  room  here  for  a  detailed  examination 
of  the  catalogue.  Many  of  the  books  here  priced 
may  still,  by  the  lucky,  be  bought  at  considerably 
lower  prices  than  Mr.  Dobell's,  simply  owing  to  the 
102 


The  Prices  of  Restoration  Books 

sluggishness  hitherto  of  both  dealers  and  buyers. 
But  considering  that  he  is  establishing  a  market,  and 
has  had  the  very  great  labour  of  making  and  an- 
notating this  catalogue,  his  prices  as  a  whole  seem  to 
me  extremely  reasonable,  and  far  lower  than  they 
can  possibly  be  a  few  years  hence.  One  of  the 
"  items  "  he  stars  is  a  series  of  papers  relative  to 
Dryden's  translation  of  Virgil,  mostly  in  the  hand- 
writing of  his  publisher,  Jacob  Tonson.  "  These 
papers  are  of  the  highest  importance,  and  necessary 
in  making  any  calculations  as  to  the  amount  of  money 
Dryden  earned  by  his  translation  ";  and  Mr.  Dobell 
asks  £40  for  them.  I  confess  that  to  me  they  are 
not  highly  important,  but  any  one  who  is  tempted  to 
think  that  such  things  do  not  matter  should  reflect 
on  the  price  that  would  be  asked  and  given  for  sim- 
ilar papers  relating  to  the  transactions  between 
Shakespeare,  or  Mr.  W.  H.,  or  some  person  un- 
known, and  Mr.  T.  Thorpe.  Most  of  the  books 
are  priced  in  the  neighbourhood  of  a  pound  or  two; 
some  are  cheaper  and  a  few  are  already  expensive. 
Lord  Orrery's  posthumous  Poems  on  Most  of  the 
Festivals  of  the  Church  ("  From  the  peculiar  type 
used  it  has  been  suggested  that  this  volume  was 
printed  and  set  up  at  Cork")  Is  going  for  £5.  A 
second  edition  of  Brome's  Songs  and  Other  Poems 
(1664)  is  priced  at  six  guineas;  and  the  same 
amount  is  asked  for  James  Carkesse's  Lucida  Inter- 
valla  (written  from  Bedlam,  1679),  of  which  Mr. 
Wheatley  could  not  find  a  perfect  copy.  Four 
guineas  is  asked  for  a  slightly  defective  first  edition 

103 


Books  in  General 

of  Congreve's  The  Old  Batchelour;  six  guineas  for 
a  first  edition  of  Annus  Mirabilis;  and  seven  or  eight 
guineas  for  other  works  by  Dryden,  of  whom  Mr. 
Dobell's  collection  is  remarkably  comprehensive. 
A  second  edition  of  F'arquhar's  The  Recruiting  Of- 
ficer (recently  performed  by  the  Stage  Society)  is 
priced  at  six  guineas;  and  eight  guineas  is  the  price 
of  a  first  edition  of  Flatman's  Poems.  Flatman, 
unknown  to  the  general  reader,  has  a  rather 
strange  vogue  in  the  auction  room;  his  most  amusing 
effort  is  a  description  of  his  distaste  for  an  active 
part  in  warfare.  The  most  notable  book  offered, 
however,  Is  a  (supposedly  unique)  copy  of  Mar- 
veil's  Miscellaneous  Poems,  1681,  first  recorded 
eleven  years  ago.  "  All  other  known  copies  of  the 
book  collate  irregularly,  some  of  the  sheets  not  hav- 
ing their  full  numbers  of  leaves,  and  until  the  dis- 
covery of  this  copy  no  explanation  of  the  irregular- 
ity was  forthcoming,  but  It  is  now  evident  that  sup- 
pressions were  made  whilst  the  book  was  passing 
through  the  press.  The  missing  leaves  of  the  ordi- 
nary copies,  as  they  appear  here,  contain  the  three 
poems  relating  to  Oliver  Cromwell,  including  the 
famous  '  Horatlan  Ode  upon  Cromwell's  Return 
from  Ireland.'  It  had  always  been  supposed  that 
this  ode  was  not  printed  until  1776,  when  It  ap- 
peared in  the  edition  edited  by  Captain  Thompson." 
Thompson  destroyed  his  manuscript,  and  the  pres- 
ent volume  Is  the  only  external  authority  for  the 
authenticity  of  the  poem.  Mr.  Dobell  asks  £275 
for  it,  and  it  ought  to  go  to  the  British  Museum. 
104 


The  Prices  of  Restoration  Books 

There  is  a  great  field  open  for  editors.  The 
manuscripts  of  the  period  have  not  been  thor- 
oughly read ;  and  many  charming  things  probably 
remain  to  be  discovered  and  published.  The  nu- 
merous miscellanies  have  never  been  properly  ex- 
amined with  an  eye  to  ascription  of  their  contents 
—  though  here  and  there  (as  in  the  case  of  Mrs. 
Behn,  who  was  recently  admirably  edited  by  Mr. 
Montagu  Summers)  an  editor  has  ransacked  them 
with  his  eye  on  a  single  author.  Most  even  of  the 
principal  writers  have  not  been  properly  edited: 
even  of  Dryden  no  one  has  collated  the  early  edi- 
tions. The  various  volumes  and  editions  of  the 
(often  grossly  misnamed)  "  State  Poems  "  would 
alone  give  a  conscientious  editor  years  of  work. 
The  song  books  (of  which  the  not-yet-adequately- 
studied  Pills  to  Purge  Melancholy  is  the  prince,  and 
the  type)  contain  masses  of  songs,  some  new,  some 
traditional,  some  jingles,  some  beautiful  poetry,  of 
which  the  texts  require  purification  or  the  authorship 
remains  to  be  determined.  As  one  turns  Mr.  Do- 
bell's  pages  one  notices  the  names  of  authors  un- 
known to  any  previous  compiler;  but  one  notices  still 
more  frequently  names  to  which  scholarship  has  not 
yet  done  justice.  I  turn,  for  instance,  to  William 
Walsh.  I  see  that  Mr.  Dobell  offers,  for  5s.  each, 
two  copies  of  Walsh's  Funeral  Elegy  upon  the 
death  of  Queen  Mary  (1695)  ;  and,  for  30s.,  four 
handwritten  transcripts  of  The  Golden  Age  Re- 
triev'd,  or  the  4th  Eclogue  of  Virgil  translated. 
The  manuscripts  give,  apparently,  a  better  text  than 

105 


Books  in  General 

that  printed.  Neither  of  these  works  is  of  stupen- 
dous interest.  But  Walsh  wrote  two  of  the  most 
delightful  things  of  his  time,  and  even  when  he  is 
writing  most  nearly  to  the  general  current  man- 
ner he  retains  his  individuality.  The  only  attempts 
at  a  collected  edition  of  him  with  which  I  am  ac- 
quainted are  a  very  bad  eighteenth  century  one  and 
an  early  nineteenth  century  one  directly  cribbed 
from  it.  His  "  output  "  was  small,  though  research 
may  still  add  a  few  pieces  to  those  which  are  known. 
But  he  is  well  worth  editing;  and,  even  if  he  weren't, 
they  will  simply  have  to  edit  him  when  they  have 
done  with  his  predecessors  and  major  contempo- 
raries. Here  are  some  of  the  essential  materials 
going  in  Mr.  Dobell's  shop  for  a  few  shillings.  I 
think  I  shall  have  to  edit  him  myself. 


io6 


The  Humours  of  Hymnology 

THERE  was  once  an  amusing  article  on  the 
humours  of  hymnology  in  the  New  Wit- 
ness. It  was  written  by  Mr.  T.  M.  Pope 
and  he  had  collected  some  strange  freaks.  Dr. 
Watts,  it  appears,  began  one  of  his  children's  hymns 
with  "  'Tis  dangerous  to  provoke  a  God  ";  and  ob- 
served in  another  that  there  was  no  sight  on  earth 
so  fair  as  death: 

Not  all  the  gay  pageants  that  breathe 
Can  with  a  dead  body   compare. 

But  possibly  the  most  finished  of  his  examples  was 
that  celebrating  the  virtues  of  four  saints  in  one 
stanza: 

Ever  constant  in  our  aims, 
Like  St.  Philip  and  St.  James: 
Always  striving  to  be  good, 
Like  St.  Simon  and  St.  Judef 

As  an  essay  in  compressed  hagiology  this  could 
not  easily  be  equalled. 

It  is  an  entertaining  subject.  Clergymen  will 
often  talk  about  it;  there  is  an  indefinable  flavour 
of  harmless,  indirect  blasphemy  about  it.     But  there 

107 


Books  in  General 

are  places  where  you  can  find  appalling  hymns  not 
in  single  spies  but  in  battalions.  Revivalist  hymn- 
books  and  those  of  eccentric  sects  are  always  worth 
inspection.  One  of  the  worst  on  record  is  that  used 
by  the  followers  of  Joanna  Southcott.  I  have  a 
copy  dated  1804.  The  title-page,  headed  "The 
Song  of  Moses  and  the  Lamb,"  describes  it  as  "  An 
Hymn  Book  for  the  Sealed  Number  or,  the  Millen- 
nium-Church, collected  from  the  Writings  of  Joanna 
Southcott,  the  Woman  Clothed  with  the  Sun."  Un- 
derneath is  a  note,  unaffectedly  prefaced  with 
"  N.B.,"  saying  that  "  Her  writings  are  the  leaves 
of  the  Tree  of  Life,  for  the  healing  of  the  Na- 
tions"; and  a  further  statement,  backed  by  the 
authority  of  Revelations,  that  "  no  man  could  learn 
that  Song,  but  the  144,000,  who  were  redeemed 
from  the  Earth."  Personally  I  should  not  greatly 
care  to  learn  it,  even  though  the  editors  candidly 
admit  that  they  have  made  "  a  few  necessary  altera- 
tions, as  the  metres  did  require  it."  They  cor- 
rected cautiously,  however,  as  they  held  that  "  every 
line  in  this  Hymn-Book  is  true,  and  not  the  least  in- 
ferior to  the  Bible,  particularly  to  the  Psalms  of 
David;  yea  far  superior,  and  exceeds  them." 

Joanna's  style  may  be  exemplified  by  the  assur- 
ance that  men  v/ill  never  attain  to  glory  until  they 
recognize  her  divine  mission  and  penitently 

With  the  woman  do  agree 

To   take   the  fruit  held  out  by   she. 

108 


The  Humours  of  Hymnology 

To  this  use  of  pronoun  she  was  addicted;  another 
instance  is 

The  blades  that  I  have  call'd  be  wheat, 
Are  those  that  judge  the  calling  great, 
That  they  from  Satan  shall  be  free, 
And  Pharaoh  was  a  type  of  he. 

Occasionally  she  is,  like  most  mystics,  obscure: 

To  ivarn  their  friend  of  ev'ry  truth  they  know, 
'Tis  plain  I  did  for  them,  the  truth  is  so 
And  so  the  bread  is  on  the  waters  cast. 
And  like  thy  uncle  now  the  Jews  will  burst. 

And  almost  invariably  she  has  to  labour  hard  to 
express  herself.     A  good  example  is: 

Then  as  a  sparrow  on  the  house, 
Thou  say' St  thou  stand' st  alone. 

And  with  thee  to  assisting  oft, 

The  Lord  ivell  knoiv'th   thou'st   none. 

It  is  not  an  improvement  on  the  original  image. 

This  comparison  of  David  (or  another)  with  the 
sparrow  is  a  favourite  stumbling-block.  It  supplies 
one  of  the  best  passages  in  the  extraordinary  met- 
rical version  of  the  Psalms  which,  allowed  in  the 
eighteenth  century  by  the  Authority  of  the  General 
Assembly  of  the  Kirk  of  Scotland,  is  still,  I  believe, 
appointed  to  be  sung  in  Scottish  Congregations  and 
Families.     When  originally  issued  the  version  was 

109 


Books  in  General 

announced  to  be  "  more  plain,  smooth,  and  agree- 
able to  the  Text  than  any  heretofore,"  The  spar- 
row passage  runs : 

/  like  an  owl  in  desart  am, 

That  nightly   there  doth  moan. 

I  watch,  and  like  a  sparrow  am 
On  the  house-top  alone. 

which  may  be  agreeable  to  the  text  but  is  scarcely 
so  to  the  reader.  The  normal  course  of  this  great 
hymnal  might  be  shown  by  its  transformation  of  By 
the  Waters  of  Babylon,  which  proceeds  evenly  to 
a  perfect  close  with: 

Yea,  happy  shall  he  he, 

Thy   tender  little  ones 
Who  shall  lay  hold  upon,  and  them 

Shall  dash  against  the  stones. 

This  is  what  the  translator  had  the  impudence  to 
call  smooth. 


no 


A  Dreadful  Story 


MRS.  HUMPHRY  WARD  In  her  remi- 
niscences tells  one  of  the  world's  most 
horrible  stories.  In  the  eighteen-thirties 
a  Spaniard  (who  later  on  was  a  friend  of  hers) 
was  hunting  for  Spanish  MSS  for  Sir  Thomas 
Phillipps.  He  knew  at  that  time  nothing  about 
English  books.  In  a  palace  at  Valladolid  he  found 
a  friend 

"  in  the  old  library  of  the  old  house,  engaged  in  a 
work  of  destruction.  On  the  floor  of  the  long  room 
was  a  large  brasero,  in  which  the  new  librarian  was 
burning  up  a  quantity  of  what  he  described  as  use- 
less and  miscellaneous  books.  .  .  .  There  was  a 
pile  of  old  books  whose  turn  had  not  yet  come  lying 
on  the  floor.  Gayangos  picked  one  up.  It  was  a 
volume  containing  the  plays  of  Mr.  William  Shake- 
speare, and  published  in  1623.  In  other  words,  it 
was  a  copy  of  the  First  Folio,  and,  as  he  declared 
to  me,  in  excellent  preservation.  .  .  .  The  book  had 
belonged  to  Count  Gondomar;  ...  its  margins 
were  covered  with  notes  In  a  seventeeth  century 
hand." 

When  he  reached  England  he  told  Sir  Thomas  and 
J.    O.    HaUiwell     (-Phillipps).     They    were    both 

III 


Books  in  General 

wildly  excited.  Gondomar  was  Ambassador  in 
London  in  Shakespeare's  day;  the  notes  were  prob- 
ably his;  anything  might  be  in  them.  Gondomar 
had  possibly  set  down  all  the  memories  of  the  plays 
he  had  seen  acted,  and  perhaps  all  sorts  of  informa- 
tion about  Shakespeare.  Gayangos  was  hurried 
back  to  Spain.  But  when  he  got  to  Valladolid  the 
book  was  gone. 

One  really  well-annotated  copy  might  save  us  a 
lot  of  trouble.  It  was  improbable,  however,  that 
annotations  by  a  Spaniard  would  do  one  of  the  most 
important  things  —  i.e.,  settle  which  of  the  doubtful 
plays  and  passages  Shakespeare  wrote.  In  a  me- 
morial addressed  by  the  Irish  Nationalists  to  Presi- 
dent Wilson  it  was  alleged  that  even  the  greatest  of 
Englishmen  was  so  congenitally  unfair  towards 
other  nations  that  in  Henry  VI.  he  wrote  in  a  brutal 
and  blackguardedly  way  about  Joan  of  Arc.  The 
political  relevance  of  this  I  will  not  discuss,  nor  its 
tact.  But  its  imbecility  as  a  literary  judgment  I  do 
feel  competent  to  mention.  In  the  first  place,  the 
very  objectionableness  of  the  sentiments  would  dem- 
onstrate to  any  unprejudiced  person  who  knows  his 
Shakespeare  that  Shakespeare  could  not  possibly 
have  written  this  part  of  the  play.  However  little 
we  know  about  Shakespeare,  we  know  he  was 
neither  cruel  nor  a  bigot  nor  a  cad.  He  could  no 
more  have  written  the  whole  of  this  play  than 
George  Meredith  could  have  done  so.  That,  how- 
ever, may  be  considered  a  matter  of  opinion,  and  cer- 
112 


A  Dreadful  Story 

talnly  we  are  not  accustomed  to  settle  questions  of 
authorship  by  testing  moral  atmospheres.  But  these 
ignorant  manifestants,  in  their  heat,  did  not  even 
attempt  to  discover  whether  there  was  the  slightest 
ground  for  supposing  that  Shakespeare  wrote  the 
play.  Had  they  remembered  that  even  people  with 
a  just  grievance  have  a  duty  of  verifying  their 
charges,  however  irrelevant,  they  would  have  found 
that  for  indisputable  textual  reasons  it  was  long  ago 
decided  that  Shakespeare  had  nothing  to  do  with 
Joan  of  Arc.  The  universality  of  that  judgment  is 
notorious;  but  one  may  as  well  give  chapter  and 
verse.     I  may  quote  Sir  Sidney  Lee: 

"  At  the  most  generous  computation  no  more  than 
300  out  of  the  2,600  lines  of  the  First  Part  (of 
Henry  VI.)  bear  the  impress  of  Shakespeare's  style. 
.  .  .  The  lifeless  beat  of  the  verse  and  the  crudity 
of  the  language  conclusively  deprive  Shakespeare  of 
all  responsibility  for  the  brutal  scenes  travesting  the 
story  of  Joan  of  Arc  which  the  author  of  the  first 
part  of  Henry  VI.  somewhat  slavishly  drew  from 
HoHnshed." 

According  to  Mr.  Fleay  the  play  "  is  evidently 
written  by  several  hands,"  and  Shakespeare  merely 
added  a  little  after  It  had  been  given  to  the  man- 
ager. He  thought  that  Marlowe,  Peele,  Lodge  and 
Greene  botched  it  up  together.  Coleridge,  in  his 
Notes  of  18 1 8,  told  us  to  read  first  a  few  passages 
even  from  Shakespeare's  earliest  dramas,  and  then  a 

113 


Books  in  General 

speech  from  Act  L,  Sc.  i,  of  Henry  VI.,  Part  I. 
"  Read,"  he  says,  in  words  which  I  commend  to  Mr. 
John  Dillon, 

"  in  the  same  way  this  speech,  with  especial  attention 
to  the  metre;  and  if  you  do  not  feel  the  impossibility 
of  the  latter  having  been  written  by  Shakespeare,  all 
I  dare  to  suggest  is,  that  you  may  have  ears  —  for  so 
has  another  animal  —  but  an  ear  you  cannot  have, 
me  jiidice." 

Dowden,  of  whom,  since  he  was  a  Professor,  in 
Dublin,  Mr.  Dillon  and  his  colleagues  may  have 
heard,  when  arranging  Shakespeare's  plays,  boldly 
put  Henry  VI.  in  the  "  Pre-Shakesperian  Group." 

Hazlitt  remarks,  by  the  way,  that  Joan  was  even 
more  scurvily  treated  in  Voltaire's  La  Pucelle.  Vol- 
taire was  not  an  Englishman,  or  an  Orangeman,  or 
an  oppressor  of  small  nationalities. 


114 


Dr.  Donne's  Tomb 

I  HAD  made  a  reference  to  "  theological  book- 
sellers who  cater  for  clergymen  and  regard 
Donne  primarily  not  as  John  Donne,  but  as  the 
Dean  of  St.  Paul's."  Two  days  afterwards  I  met  a 
soldier  in  the  streets  who  talked  about  this.  He 
said  that  he  thought  Dr.  Inge  had  points  of  resem- 
blance to  Donne  and  was  an  original  and  remarkable 
man.  I  agreed  with  this.  He  then  said  that  he  had 
never  seen  Donne's  tomb  and  effigy;  I  said  that  I 
knew  it  only  from  reproductions.  We  thought  we 
would  go  there.  We  began  to  walk.  It  began  to 
rain.  We  stopped  a  taxi.  I  said:  "St.  Paul's 
Cathedral,  please,"  and  the  driver  gaped.  My  com- 
panion then  said:  "  Don't  you  know  where  it  is?  " 
and  the  driver's  mouth  closed  up  and  expanded  hori- 
zontally.     So  off  we  went,  quite  a  happy  party. 

Had  I  the  space,  the  inclinations  and  the  talents 
of  the  realistic  novelist,  I  should  go  on  with  this  lei- 
surely detail.  I  should  indicate  the  colour  of  the 
cabman's  nose  (though  perhaps  you  can  guess  that), 
the  amount  of  paper  on  the  cathedral  steps,  the  dis- 
positions of  the  pigeons,  the  bleachings  and  black- 
enings  on  pillars  and  walls,  the  dress,  attitudes  and 
banal  remarks  of  the  people  who  emerged  as  we 
went  in,  the  sounds  made  by  various  footsteps,  the 

115- 


Books  in  General 

light  streaming  through  various  windows,  and  the 
probable  occupations  and  domestic  infeUcities  of  the 
persons  who,  scattered  about  the  rows  of  chairs, 
were  awaiting  the  opening  of  the  four  o'clock  service. 
But  this  is  impossible.  Compression  is  essential, 
and  all  these  things  must  be  left  to  the  imagination. 
For  me,  I  must  hurry  on  with  my  story,  if  story  it  be. 

We  went  up  the  south  aisle  and  drew  blank;  there 
were  some  terrible  monuments  which  should  cer- 
tainly join  the  great  majority  in  Westminster  Abbey. 
We  then  tried  the  north  aisle.  We  wondered  why 
Alfred  Stevens  had  put  his  powerful  equestrian 
statue  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington  so  high  that  no  one 
could  see  it.  We  remarked  that  there  was  one  sen- 
tence on  the  tomb  of  Gordon  (that  about  his  remain- 
ing at  Khartoum)  which,  like  many  lapidary  inscrip- 
tions, did  not  tell  the  whole  truth.  We  thought  that 
the  tomb  of  Lord  Leighton,  though  not  a  master- 
piece, illustrated  the  enormous  advance  made  by 
modern  academic  work  as  against  eighteenth  century 
academic  work.  We  then  reached  the  end  of  the 
aisle  and  found  a  group  of  vergers.  They  were 
white-haired  and  wrinkled;  their  black  gowns  and 
long  silver  crooks  inspired  a  respect  which  verged  on 
fear.  The  conversation  that  followed  showed  that 
theological  booksellers  and  their  customers  are  not 
the  only  people  who  think  of  Donne  as  primarily  a 
divine: 

"  '  Could  you  tell  us  where   the  tomb   of  John 
Donne  is?  ' 
ii6 


^ 


Dr.  Donne's  Tomb 

"'Who?' 

John  Donne;  Dean  Donne.' 
'''Oh;  Dean  Donne!  '" 

They  hfted  a  little  red  rope  from  Its  support, 
showed  us  across  and  let  us  Into  the  aisle  at  the  south 
of  the  choir.  There,  In  a  dark  place  flat  against  the 
wall,  It  stood:  the  only  monument  In  Old  St.  Paul's, 
I  think,  which  escaped  the  great  Fire  of  London. 
He  stands,  with  his  hands  folded  and  the  shroud 
covering  him  from  head  to  foot;  his  intense,  sardonic 
face,  with  Its  eyes  closed,  looks  out  from  his  hood 
and  is  the  only  thing  of  him  that  shows.  It  Is  a 
queer,  stark,  frozen  thing:  there  Is  no  beauty  about 
it,  but  a  force  that  makes  everything  else  In  the  Ca- 
thedral seem  dead.  The  sculptor  was  not  a  great  ar- 
tist; but  he  must  have  been  under  the  spell  of  Donne 
when  he  made  It.  I  think  It  Is  in  Isaak  Walton's 
Life  that  one  reads  the  story  of  Donne's  prepara- 
tions for  that  effigy;  how  he  rose  from  his  sick-bed, 
had  braziers  lit  all  about  his  great  room  at  the  Dean- 
ery, and  stood  upon  an  urn  In  that  attitude  of  death 
whilst  a  painter  sketched  him.  On  that  painting  the 
statue  In  St.  Paul's  was  presumably  based.  But  not 
entirely.  The  folds  of  the  drapery  are  the  folds 
into  which  a  recumbent  man's  would  fall.  It  ap- 
pears, therefore,  that  the  sculptor  used  a  recumbent 
model  for  his  drapery;  he  may  have  intended  his  ef- 
figy to  lie  flat  along  a  tomb,  as  effigies  usually  do;  for 
all  I  know  (though  here  I  may  have  some  antiquary 
correcting  me)  the  effigy  did  lie  flat  at  first,  and  was 

117 


Books  in  General 

never  erect  until  Wren  had  built  his  new  Cathedral. 
At  all  events  there  it  is;  cold  in  a  quiet  corner;  and 
both  by  its  coldness  and  its  strength  very  out  of  keep- 
ing with  its  surroundings.  "  Out  of  keeping  "  is  a 
weak  phrase.  In  that  great,  complacent,  Italianate 
building,  which  looks  so  much  smaller  than  it  is,  a 
building  designed  with  skill  but  no  inspiration,  lack- 
ing all  mystery,  all  fervour,  all  sense  of  the  fierceness 
of  life,  the  terror  and  the  importance  of  death,  the 
insistence  of  a  surrounding  eternity,  the  power  or  the 
love  or  the  beauty  of  God,  this  small,  crinkled  statue 
is  like  a  word  of  challenge  or  rebuke,  and  of  lordly 
derision.  No  place  but  a  Gothic  building  would 
properly  hold  it;  and  it  is  seemly  that  that  should  be 
so  with  a  statue  of  Dean  Donne.  He  was,  in  some 
ways,  a  child  of  the  Renaissance:  he  had  its  learning, 
its  curiosity,  and,  in  youth,  its  swagger  and  its  reck- 
lessness. But  still  more  he  had  affinity  with  the 
scholars  of  the  Middle  Ages  in  whom  he  was  pro- 
foundly read;  and  that  affinity  is  never  more  strongly 
realized  than  when  one  is  reading  his  Sermons  with 
their  passionate,  tortuous  extravagant  logic  and  their 
towering  caverns  of  gloom  shot  with  unearthly  fire. 
Donne's  brain  was  the  strangest  and  most  elaborate 
Gothic  building  ever  seen  on  earth. 


ii8 


Russian  Wit 

I  HAVE  just  been  reading  a  little  book,  Russian 
Proverbs  and  their  English  Equivalents,  by 
Louis  Segal,  published  by  Kegan  Paul.  The 
editor  quotes  Bacon's  remark:  "The  genius,  wit, 
and  spirit  of  a  nation  are  discovered  by  its  proverbs." 
I  append  a  few  selected  ones  in  order  that  my  read- 
ers may  have  an  opportunity  of  defining  the  genius, 
wit,  and  spirit  of  the  Russians: 

"  Curled  cows  have  short  horns. 

"  Men  meet  whilst  hills  stand  still. 

"  Kings  have  long  arms  and  many  eyes  and  ears. 

"  Beware  of  the  fore  part  of  an  ox,  the  hind  part 
of  a  mule,  and  all  sides  of  a  monk. 

"  Hawks  do  not  pick  out  hawks'  eyes. 

"  The  ocean  is  but  knee-deep  to  a  drunken  man. 

"  An  unfortunate  man  would  be  drowned  in  a  tea- 
cup. 

"  A  bad  arrangement  is  preferable  to  the  best  law- 
suit. 

"  God  is  too  high  and  the  Tsar  is  too  far  away. 

"  The  world  is  large  enough  to  contain  all  the  peo- 
ple." 

These  are  good.  But  I  think  the  best  proverb  I 
ever  struck  was  an  African  negro  one.  It  says: 
"  No  man  can  Hck  his  own  back."     How  true  that  is ! 

119 


The  Goncourt  Journal  in 
English 

POLITICAL  events  affect  the  manner  in  which 
one  reads  books.  I  have  been  reading  the 
late  Julius  West's  English  courageous  abridg- 
ment of  the  Journal  des  Goncourt,  published  by  Nel- 
son's at  the  absurdly  low  price  of  a  shilling.  It  is  the 
most  diverting  of  modern  literary  memoirs.  In  Jules 
de  Goncourt's  diary  from  185  i  to  his  death  in  1870, 
and  in  Edmond's  continuation  from  that  year 
until  the  'nineties,  one  has  a  long  panorama  of 
social  and  political  life  in  Paris  during  the  second 
half  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Almost  every  prom- 
inent Frenchman  of  the  time  is  sketched  in  the  book; 
every  movement  is  reflected  in  it;  there  are  endless 
witty  stories  and  phrases;  and  there  is  also  the  auto- 
biography of  two  extremely  interesting  men.  Yet, 
looking  at  it  just  now,  one  finds  one's  eyes  glued  to 
every  casual  statement  the  diarists  made  or  recorded 
about  national  characteristics  or  about  war.  Such 
statements  are  very  numerous  in  Mr.  West's  selec- 
tion; and  the  part  of  the  journal  most  fully  repre- 
sented is  that  which  covers  the  Franco-German  War, 
and  especially  the  siege  of  Paris,  which  Edmond  de- 
scribed with  the  eagerness  of  a  journalist  and  the  de- 
tachment of  an  artist.  That  detachment  was  never 
120 


The  Goncourt  Journal  in  English 

more  marked  than  during  the  siege  :  detachment,  that 
is,  from  the  life  of  action,  and  the  feelings  of  those 
around  him  —  not  from  the  physiological  influence 
of  external  events.  There  are  many  authors  at  this 
moment  who  will  find  their  own  state  anticipated  in 
this,  for  example : 

"October  15th,  1870.  I  live  on  myself.  I  can 
only  exchange  my  views  for  some  as  little  varied  as 
my  own;  I  only  read  news  of  a  wretched  war;  I  can 
only  find  in  the  newspapers  the  eternal  repetition  of 
these  defeats  they  call  '  reconnaissances  on  the 
offensive  ';  I  am  driven  from  the  Boulevards  by  the 
forced  economy  of  gas;  I  can  no  longer  enjoy  a  noc- 
turnal life  in  this  city  where  everybody  goes  to  bed 
early.  I  can  read  nothing.  I  cannot  dwell  in  the 
pure  realm  of  thought  because  of  the  lowering  of 
that  thought  by  the  poverty  of  its  food;  I  lack  the 
new,  and  I  vegetate  in  this  brutal  and  monstrous 
thing  —  war.  The  Parisian  in  Paris  is  overcome 
by  a  boredom  that  is  like  the  boredom  of  a  provin- 
cial town." 

We  hear  a  great  deal  of  the  discussion  inside  the 
town.  We  find  him  dining  at  Brebant's  with  Berthe- 
lot,  Saint-Victor,  Renan,  and  others  on  September 
6th,  1870.  Defeat  has  been  overwhelming;  resist- 
ance is  hopeless: 

"  We  curse  that  Prussian  savagery  which  Genseric 
is  starting  again. 

"  On  this  Renan  says :     '  The  Germans  have  few 

121 


Books  in  General 

joys  In  life,  and  the  greatest  one  they  know  they  put 
into  hating;  into  the  thought  and  the  perpetration  of 
vengeance.'  " 

Two  months  later  Bismarck  is  compared  with  Attila. 
The  ferocity  and  boorishness  of  Germans,  indeed,  is  a 
recurring  theme.  Here  is  an  entry  of  April  17th, 
1877: 

"  We  were  talking  about  the  implacability  of  the 
Germans;  of  the  impossibility  of  speaking  to  the 
humanity  of  these  men,  so  reserved  and  so  inaccessi- 
ble. Cherbuliez  tells  us  that  we  are  wrong,  that  the 
Teutons  have  a  quarter  of  an  hour  when  they  may 
make  concessions;  it  is  the  quarter  of  an  hour  which 
slips  past  between  dessert  after  dinner  and  the  tenth 
whiff  of  a  cigar." 

The  last  entry  of  the  sort  is  dated  1890: 

"  This  young  German  Emperor,  this  neurotic 
mystic,  this  enthusiast  for  the  religious  and  warlike 
operas  of  Wagner,  this  man,  who,  in  his  dreams, 
wears  the  white  armour  of  Parsifal,  with  his  sleepless 
nights,  his  sickly  activity,  his  feverish  brain,  seems  to 
be  a  monarch  who  will  be  very  troublesome  in  the 
future." 

A  few  years  ago  one  would  have  skimmed  all  these 
passages;  now  they  stick  out  of  the  page. 

Not  that  de  Goncourt  was  particularly  apprecia- 
122 


The  Goncourt  Journal  in  English 

tive  of  any  nation  —  even  his  own,  which  at  times 
appeared  to  him  as  a  noisy  rabble  that  made  the  lives 
of  civilized  men  intolerable.  But  whereas  the  Ger- 
mans are  regarded  as  abominable,  the  others  appear 
to  be  rather  comic.  As  light  upon  his  conception  of 
Englishmen  we  get  this  ( 1874)  : 

"  I  am  in  a  compartment  of  Englishmen,  and  I 
saw  seven  of  them  simultaneously  wind  up  their 
watches.  It  was  done  so  mechanically,  so  automati- 
cally, that  it  nearly  frightened  me,  and  I  fled  into  an- 
other compartment." 

But  "  when  these  Englishmen  set  out  to  be  origi- 
nal, they  do  so  in  a  much  more  striking  manner  than 
other  Europeans."  And  early  in  Jules's  diary  we  find 
this  country  held  up  by  two  distinguished  men  as  the 
home  of  liberty  and  diffused  culture  as  against  bour- 
geois, philistine,  police-ridden  France.  Taine  ob- 
serves that  French  literary  influence  is  declining,  and 
that  only  English  authors  are  read.       He 

"  talks  about  the  absence  of  an  intellectual  movement 
in  provincial  France,  when  compared  with  all  the 
learned  societies  in  English  counties  and  in  German 
towns.  He  speaks  about  this  overgrown  Paris  of 
ours,  which  absorbs  everything,  and  of  the  future  of 
France,  which,  under  existing  conditions,  must  end 
up  by  a  congestion  of  the  brain.  Then  he  goes  on 
to  praise  England,  and  is  taken  up  by  Sainte-Beuve, 
who  confides  to  him  his  disgust  at  being  a  French- 

123 


Books  in  General 

man.  '  I  know  what  one  is  told:  a  Parisian  isn't  a 
Frenchman,  he  is  a  Parisian;  but  one  is  French  all  the 
same,  which  means  one  is  nothing  at  all  ...  a 
country  where  there  are  policemen  everywhere  .  .  . 
I  wish  I  were  English;  an  Englishman  is  at  any  rate 
somebody.'  " 

This  will  read  oddly  to  those  English  people  who 
think  that  every  man  who  can  write  French  is  a 
genius,  and  that  Paris  is,  and  always  has  been,  the 
centre  of  the  world. 

The  Journal  is  so  rich  in  detail  that  six  pages  of 
extracts  would  scarcely  give  an  idea  of  it  to  a  reader 
unfamiliar  with  it.  We  grow  intimate,  through  the 
de  Goncourts,  with  men  like  Daudet  and  Zola,  whom 
we  follow  from  the  penury  in  which  (an  aspirant  to 
epic  poetry)  he  Hved  as  a  youth,  luxuriating  in  a  grey 
pessimism  and  pawning  his  shirt  to  buy  food,  until 
the  days  when,  still  discontented,  he  was  the  "  larg- 
est seller  "  in  France.  And  we  get  glimpses  of  hun- 
dreds of  others,  from  Baudelaire,  with  his  "  studied 
elegance  "  and  his  "  voice  that  cuts  like  steel  "  to 
Sarah  Bernhardt,  Anatole  France,  and  President 
Poincare.  Theophile  Gautier,  during  the  siege  of 
Paris,  has  to  wear  braces  for  the  first  time  in  his  life, 
owing  to  the  attrition  of  his  abdomen,  which  had  pre- 
viously "  done  the  needful  "  in  the  way  of  support. 
Maupassant,  going  mad,  has  no  book  but  the  Alma- 
nack de  Gotha  on  his  table.  Wilde,  a  young  poet, 
turns  up  and  astonishes  the  incredulous  French  by 
124 


The  Goncourt  Journal  in  English 

telling  the  American  chestnut  about  "  Do  not  shoot 
the  conductor,  he  is  doing  his  best";  and  the  self- 
contained  Flaubert,  after  visiting  a  house  with  a 
small  baby  in  it,  says:  "  A  little  thing  like  that  in 
the  house  is  the  only  thing  in  the  world  that  mat- 
ters !  "  Jumbled  together  with  the  daily  records  are 
reflections  on  everything  in  heaven  and  earth:  on 
Mexico,  where,  if  you  want  to  collect  an  army,  you 
get  a  brass  band  to  play  and  lassoo  those  who  collect 
to  hear  it;  on  American  dentistry,  which  may  some 
day,  during  a  financial  crisis,  lead  to  a  wholesale  exca- 
vation of  cemeteries  for  the  sake  of  countless  in- 
terred gold  stoppings;  on  British  bantams,  "little 
birds  who  are  embarrassed  by  their  leg-feathers  and 
run  about  looking  as  troubled  as  people  whose  trou- 
sers are  coming  down."  Through  it  all  runs  the 
thread  of  personal  feeling:  the  struggle  of  the  broth- 
ers for  success,  Edmond's  grief  for  his  brother,  his 
literary  jealousies,  his  worries  about  the  censorship, 
his  agonies  on  first  nights,  and,  at  the  close,  a  taste  of 
public  recognition  —  a  banquet  or  two,  and  an  old 
age  full  of  tender  and  whimsical  memories  of  boy- 
hood. Edmond's  style  is  not  so  concise  as  Jule's, 
had  not  that  bite  and  exactitude;  but  he  wrote  with 
unfailing  vividness  and  charm.  The  difference  of 
styles  comes  out  in  the  translation.  It  is  an  excellent, 
free  version;  but  one  may  just  wish  that  Mr.  West 
had  not  spoken  of  a  pavement  as  a  "  side-walk." 
We  shall  be  getting  "  trolley-car  "  and  "  hand-grip  " 
acclimatized  next. 


125 


Poland  and  Our  Poets 

THE  restoration  of  the  integrity  and  inde- 
pendence of  Poland  should  stir  some  Brit- 
ish dust.  A  century  ago  Poland  was 
one  of  the  favourite  subjects  of  our  poets,  and  no 
alien  before  or  since  has  been  more  belauded  by  our 
writers  than  Kosciusko,  whose  name  and  fame  are 
now  very  shadowy  for  most  people.  Keats  ad- 
dressed to  Kosciusko  a  sonnet  coupling  the  Pole  with 
King  Alfred.  It  is  a  very  bad  sonnet,  and  one  of 
the  most  distressing  examples  I  know  of  sense  being 
made  to  follow  rhyme.  Byron,  taking  Don  Juan 
through  Poland,  observed  that  — 

Kosciusko's  name 
Might  scatter  jire  through  ice  like  Hecla's  flame. 

And  there  are  other  references  in  the  same  tradi- 
tional vein  in  The  Age  of  Bronze: 

Ye  who  dwell 
Where  Kosciusko  dwelt,  remembering  yet 
The  unpaid  afnount  of  Catherine's  bloody  debt! 
Poland!  o'er  which  the  avenging  angel  pass'd 
But  left  thee  as  he  found  thee,  still  a  waste, 
Forgetting  all  thy  still  enduring  claim, 
Thy  lotted  people  and  extinguish' d  name, 
126 


Poland  and  Our  Poets 

Thy  sigh  for  freedom,  thy  long-flowing  tear, 
That  sound  that  crashes  in  the  tyrant's  ear  — 
Kosciusko!  .   .  . 

To  the  young  Tennyson  Poland's  blood  was  "  sacred 
blood,"  crying: 

Lord,  how  long  shall  these  things  he, 
How  long  this  icy-hearted  Muscovite 
Oppress  the  region? 

But  the  most  fervent  and  frequent  singer  of  Poland's 
woes  was  Thomas  Campbell,  who  was  continually 
writing  metrical  leading  articles  on  our  foreign 
policy.     His  Lines  on  Poland   (1831)    are  typical: 

.   .   .   .  Poles!  with  what  indignation  I  endure 
The  half-pitying  servile  mouths  that  call  you  poor. 
Poor!  is  it  England  mocks  you  with  her  grief, 
That  hates,  hut  dares  not  chide,  the  Imperial  Thief  f 
France,  with  her  soul  beneath  a  Bourbon's  thrall? 
And  Germany  that  has  no  soul  at  all? 
States,  quailing  at  the  giant  overgrown. 
Whom  dauntless  Poland  grapples  with  alone? 
No,  ye  are  rich  in  fame  even  whilst  ye  bleed. 
We  cannot  aid  you  —  we  are  poor  indeed.   .  .  . 

Parts  of  this  poem  are  amongst  the  finest  things 
Campbell  wrote.  That  cannot  be  said  of  anything 
in  his  drastic  The  Power  of  Russia,  in  which  he  ar- 
gued that  the  conquest  of  Poland  "  the  last  land  of 
heroes,"  would  be  followed  up: 

127 


Books  in  General 

Russia  that  on  his  throne  of  adamant 

Consults  what  nation's  breast  shall  he  next  gored, 
He  on  Polonia's  Golgotha  will  plant 

His  standard  fresh;  and  horde  succeeding  horde, 
On  patriot  tombstones  he  will  whet  the  sword 

For  more  stupendous  slaughters  of  the  free. 
Then   Europe's   realms,   when   their   best   blood   is 
poured, 

Shall  miss  thee,  Poland!  as  they  bend  the  knee; 
All  —  all  in  grief,  but  none  in  glory,  likening  thee. 

In  Campbell's  view  the  "  Russ  "  was  made  of  na- 
ture's basest  clay,  and  quite  beyond  redemption. 
His  address  to  Sir  Francis  Burdett,  who  in  1832 
strongly  expressed  the  below-gangway  view  on  for- 
eign policy,  anticipates  much  that  has  been  written 
by  opponents  of  the  Russian  Entente  in  the  last  few 
years.  Trafalgar  Square  has  never  outdone  the 
vigour  of  this: 

Burdett,  demand  why  Britons  send  abroad 
Soft  greetings  to  the  infanticidal  Czar, 
The  Bear  on  Poland's  babes  that  wages  war. 

Once,  we  are  told,  a  mother's  shriek   o'erawed 
A  lion,  and  he  dropped  her  lifted  child: 

But  Nicholas,  whom  neither  God  nor  law. 
Nor  Poland's   shrieking    mothers    overawe, 
Outholds  to  us  his  friendship's  gory  clutch; 
Shrink,  Britain!  shrink,  my  King  and  country,  from 

the  touch! 
128 


Poland  and  Our  Poets 

He  prays  to  Heaven  for  England's  King,  he  says; 
And  dares  he  to  the  God  of  Mercy  kneel, 
Besmeared  with  massacres  from  head  to  heel? 

No;  Moloch  is  his  god  —  to  him  he  prays; 

And   if    his    weird-like    prayers     had   power    to 
bring 

An  influence,  their  pozver  zvoiild  be  to  curse. 
His  hate  is  hateful,  but  his  love  is  worse  — 
A  serpent's  slaver  deadlier  than  its  sting! 
Oh,  feeble  statesmen,  ignominious  times. 

That   lick    the   tyrant's   feet,    and   smile   upon   his 
crimes! 

Swinburne's  sonnet  on  Poland  is  better  known. 

.   .   .   thy  sons  long  dead 
Against  a  foe  less  foul  than  this  made  head, 
Poland,  in  years  that  sound  and  shine  afar; 
Ere    the   east  beheld   in    thy    bright   sword-blade's 
stead 
The  rotten  corpse-light  of  the  Russian  star 
That  lights  toward  hell  his  bond-slaves  and  their 
Czar. 

But  this  was  later   than  the  others,   and  does  not 
ring  quite  so  convincingly. 

Misgovernment,  crime,  infringement  of  liberty 
could  be  found  elsewhere  and  nearer  home  than  in 
Poland.  But  the  circumstances  of  Polish  subjection 
were  such  as  to  strike  the  romantic  mind.  The 
partition  was  so  nakedly  unscrupulous,  the  principal 

129 


Books  in  General 

conquerors  were  a  people  so  remote,  so  numerous,  so 
wild,  and  at  that  time  so  little  known;  and  the  reck- 
less courage  of  the  Polish  risings  were  so  splendid. 
Poland's  sufferings  became  the  measure  of  her  past 
virtues,  and  poets  who  were  aflame  at  her  subjec- 
tion exaggerated  most  wildly  the  glories  of  her  his- 
tory and  the  quality  of  her  liberties.  In  reality 
Poland,  in  spite  of  its  occasional  feats,  was  a  stand- 
ing example  of  discord  and  ill-government.  It  was 
run,  as  has  been  said,  by  a  democracy  of  nobles 
"  which  persecuted  heretics  with  the  fervour  of  a 
medicEval  king,  and  ill-treated  its  serfs  after  the 
approved  methods  of  Reginald  Front  de  Boeuf." 
They  were  not  Campbell's  "  majestic  men  "  by  any 
means.  The  Aggression  from  which  their  country 
suffered  acted,  as  Wilde  said  of  literary  dialect,  as 
"  a  means  of  recreating  a  past  that  never  existed." 
Modern  bards  are  more  sophisticated.  We  have 
lost  our  political  illusions.  We  may  believe  in 
Persian  or  Finnish  freedom,  but  we  do  not  for  that 
reason  regard  Finns  as  the  finest  people  on  earth, 
or  pretend  that  Persia  in  the  past  has  displayed  the 
united  virtues  of  Athens  and  Sparta  and  the  vices 
of  neither. 


130 


Literature  and  the  Advertiser 

ONE  of  the  worst  advertisements  I  have  ever 
seen  is  before  me.  It  is  headed  with  a  well- 
known  portrait  of  Keats;  chosen  possibly 
because  it  is  the  one  in  which  the  poet  is  holding  his 
head,  a  common  practice  with  those  who  are  out  of 
sorts.     Then  follows  the  advertisement: 

A  GREAT  POET— 
AND  A  GREAT  TONIC 

PINK  RHOMBOIDS 

Then  felt  I  like  some  watcher  of  the  skies 
When  a  new  planet  swims  into  his  ken; 

Or  like  stout  Cortez,  when  with  eagle  eyes 
He  stared  at  the  Pacific  —  and  all  his  men 

Look'd  at  each  other  with  a  wild  surmise  — 
Silent,  upon  a  peak  in  Darien. 

"What  a  bracing  effect  there  is  in  such  lines! 
(The  pity  of  it,  that  the  writer  died  at  25.)  They 
send  the  blood  along  the  veins  with  an  added  glow. 
Supplement  this  with  Pink  Rhomboids,  the  Reliable 
Tonic.  They  enrich  the  blood  and  increase  the 
number  of  your  red  corpuscles  —  the  Army  Service 
Corps  of  the  body. 

"  Supplement  this  " !  But  I  will  not  paint  the  lily, 
gild  refined  gold,  or  add  an  odour  to  the  violet.  I 
will  merely  say  that  had  Mr.  Leacock  or  Messrs. 
Lucas  and  Graves  composed  this  advertisement,  he 

131 


Books  in  General 

or  they  would  have  been  told  this  was  one  more  ex- 
ample of  his  or  their  extravagant,  though  doubtless 
amusing,  humour.  The  truth  of  the  matter  is,  of 
course,  that  truth  is  even  more  horrible  than  fiction, 
which  is  saying  a  good  deal. 

I  do  not,  of  course,  suggest  that  advertisers,  who 
desire  to  make  their  advertisements  attractive, 
should  be  debarred  from  "  supplementing "  their 
own  efforts  at  composition  with  extracts  from  great 
writers.  For  the  relevant  extract  no  apology  is 
needed:  if  a  tobacco  firm  advertises  its  wares  with  a 
remark  from  Charles  Lamb  that  tobacco  is  the  young 
man's  inspiration  and  the  old  man's  consolation,  or 
one  from  Burton  or  Sir  W.  Raleigh  to  the  effect 
that  this  "  weede  did  much  solace  and  gratifie  mee 
whenas  I  did  finde  myselfe  full  of  an  atrabilious  and 
melancholique  humour,"  nobody  can  object.  Nor 
can  one  debar  didactic  sentences,  quotations  which  are 
current  moralizing  coin,  from  being  used  here  as 
everywhere  else.  The  first  great  inventor  of  the 
literary  advertisement  was  the  late  Mr.  Eno,  or  some 
anonymous  expert  in  his  employ,  who  used  to  muster 
to  the  support  of  his  excellent  and  (as  I  think)  pal- 
atable medicine  all  the  sages  of  all  the  ages:  Soc- 
rates, Epicurus,  Zeno,  M.  Aurelius,  Confucius, 
Goethe  and  Emerson.  If  Emerson  or  Zeno  said, 
"  Virtue  is  the  best  path  to  a  long  life,"  or  "  Early 
to  bed  and  early  to  rise,"  Mr.  Eno  could  certainly 
not  be  condemned  for  giving  the  truth  a  wider  cur- 
rency. One  would  not  object  to  some  of  Keats  being 
thus  employed,  as  incidental  decoration:  "A  thing 
132 


Literature  and  the  Advertiser 

of  beauty  is  a  joy  for  ever  "  is  the  sort  of  line  that 
can  be  used  anywhere  and  has  nothing  in  it  that  will 
spoil.  But  not  long,  beautiful  passages,  not  emo- 
tional passages,  not  personal  things,  wantonly  linlced 
to  things  with  which  they  have  no  relation,  and  pro- 
faned and  vulgarized  by  the  contact.  If  this  kind  of 
thing  is  to  be  admitted  by  papers  —  and  it  was  in 
a  highly  respectable  Church  organ  that  I  saw  the 
Rhomboid  effort  —  there  is  nothing  to  protect  us 
from:  "  Tennyson  was  a  great  man.  You  can  tell 
him  by  his  bald  head,  his  profile,  his  beard,  and  his 
collars.  He  said:  '  I  would  that  my  heart  could 
utter  the  thoughts  that  arise  in  me.'  What  a  loss  to 
literature !  Imagine  what  '  thoughts  '  would  have 
been  had  his  heart  been  able  to  '  utter  '  them.  Yet 
he  had  nobody  but  himself  to  blame  for  this  dis- 
astrous impediment.  If  he  had  only  taken  Jimbo's 
Pellicules  his  heart  would  have  been  equal  to  any 
calls  he  might  have  cared  to  make  upon  it."  Or: 
"  '  Not  poppy  nor  mandragora,  nor  all  the  drowsy 
syrups  of  the  world.'  Thus  Shakespeare,  who  cer- 
tainly at  times  felt  run  down  and  in  need  of  bucking 
up.  But  why  did  he  stop  the  catalogue  there? 
There  are  syrups  which  are  not  opiate  and  are  not 
'  drowsy  ';  why  did  he  say  nothing  of  Blinkers',  the 
most  invigorating  syrup  in  the  world?"  The  uses 
of  somebody's  whisky  to  Adam  Cast  Forth  and  the 
application  of  somebody's  soap  to  Lady  Macbeth's 
hands  offer  other  possibilities.  Are  we  going  to  get 
worse  and  worse  and  worse?  Speaking  dispassion- 
ately, I  rather  think  that  we  are. 

133 


Cobbett  as  Housekeeper 

MR.  DOUGLAS  PEPLER,  of  the  Hamp- 
shire House  Workshops,  Hammersmith, 
has  done  a  laudably  eccentric  thing  in  pub- 
lishing a  reprint  of  Cobbett's  Cottage  Economy. 
For  Cobbett  is  not  very  widely  read  in  our  day,  and 
original  editions  of  most  of  his  hundred  or  so  vol- 
umes can  be  picked  up  for  a  shilling  or  two  in  the 
second-hand  bookshops.  Yet  he  was  a  great  man, 
and  a  complete  man.  His  style,  at  its  best,  is  noble 
in  its  rough  eloquence  and  in  its  complete  efficiency 
for  the  various  uses  to  which  it  was  put;  he  preached 
the  normal  life  with  amazing  consistency  and  force; 
and,  unlike  most  persons  who  are  strong  on  princi- 
ples, he  was  a  good  hand  at  practical  detail.  The 
present  work  is  a  cookery  book  and  small-holder's 
guide.  It  supplies  full,  plain,  technical  instructions 
for  brewing  beer,  making  bread,  salting  mutton  and 
beef,  keeping  cows,  pigs,  bees,  geese,  ducks,  turkeys, 
fowls>  pigeons,  rabbits  and  goats,  making  illuminants, 
mustard,  clothes,  straw-plait  and  (oddly)  ice-houses. 
But  the  passion  which  led  him  to  produce  this  com- 
pendium for  the  agricultural  poor  bursts  through  oc- 
casionally in  the  hearty  dogmatism  which  is  seen, 
more  at  large,  in  such  works  as  his  Legacy  for  Par- 
sons. He  was  so  pleasantly  blunt.  When  he  at- 
tacks superfluous  "  book-learning,"  he  says  that  he 
objects  to  it  particularly 
134 


Cobbett  as  Housekeeper 

"  in  schools  over  which  the  parents  have  no  control, 
and  where  nothing  is  taught  but  the  rudiments  of 
servility,  pauperism  and  slavery." 

When  giving  his  instructions  about  brewing  he 
goes  off  into  a  defence  of  beer  as  against  "  liver-burn- 
ing and  palsy-producing  spirits  "  on  the  one  hand, 
and  "  tea-messes  "  on  the  other.  Far  more  suste- 
nance is  to  be  got  out  of  beer  than  from  the  "  corro- 
sive, gnawing  and  poisonous  "  tea  (which,  in  his  day, 
used  to  be  stewed  for  an  hour  before  drinking),  and 
he  illustrates  this  truth  with  characteristic  concrete- 
ness: 

"  It  is  impossible  for  any  one  to  deny  the  truth  of 
this  statement.  Put  it  to  the  test  with  a  lean  hog; 
give  him  the  fifteen  bushels  of  malt,  and  he  will  re- 
pay you  in  ten  score  of  bacon  or  thereabouts.  But 
give  him  the  730  tea-messes,  or  rather  begin  to  give 
them  to  him,  and  give  him  nothing  else,  and  he  is 
dead  with  hunger,  and  bequeaths  you  his  skeleton,  at 
the  end  of  about  seven  days." 

His  treatise  on  keeping  pigs  is  interrupted  by  a 
typical  diatribe.  A  paragraph  begins  with  "  this 
hog  is  altogether  a  capital  thing."  In  a  few  lines  we 
reach  a  denunciation  of  the  poor  who  have  "  fallen 
into  the  taste  of  niceness  in  food  and  finery  in  dress; 
quarter  of  a  bellyful  and  rags  are  the  consequence  "; 
and  then  this  is  traced  to  "  the  system  of  managing 
the  affairs  of  the  nation  "  which  has  made  all  "  flashy 
and  false  "  : 

^35 


Books  in  General 

"  Pomposity,  bombast,  hyperbole,  redundancy, 
and  obscurity,  both  in  speaking  and  In  writing;  mock 
delicacy  In  manners,  mock  liberality,  mock  humanity, 
and  mock  religion.  Pitt's  false  money.  Peel's  flimsy 
dresses,  WI]berforce's  potato  diet,  Castlereagh's  and 
Mackintosh's  oratory,  Walter  Scott's  poems,  Wal- 
ter's and  Stoddart's  paragraphs,  with  all  the  bad 
taste  and  baseness  and  hypocrisy  which  have  spread 
over  this  country;  all  have  arisen,  grown,  branched 
out,  bloomed  and  borne  together;  and  we  are  now 
beginning  to  taste  of  their  fruit." 

It  Is  slightly  hyperbolic  Itself,  perhaps;  but  Cobbett 
could  always  give  reasons  for  anything  he  said,  even 
If  they  were  not  always  sound  reasons. 

The  reprint  has  an  introduction  by  Mr.  G.  K. 
Chesterton,  who,  like  his  brother  and  Mr.  Hilaire 
Belloc,  has  done  his  best  to  get  Cobbett  read  by  this 
generation  both  for  his  matter  and  for  his  man- 
ner. Mr.  Chesterton,  In  discriminating  between 
Cobbett  and  Ruskin,  makes  one  rather  unjustifiable 
statement.  He  suggests  (though  he  admits  the 
charge  would  be  "  exaggerative  ")  that  "  an  unami- 
able  critic  might  say  that  Ruskin  knew  everything 
about  the  building  of  a  church  except  what  it  is  built 
for."  I  am  more  often  in  agreement  with  Mr. 
Chesterton  than  with  Ruskin;  but  I  cannot  help  re- 
membering that  one  of  the  most  eloquent  passages 
Ruskin  ever  wrote  points  at  length  the  contrast  be- 
tween an  English  Cathedral  city,  where  the  edifice 
136 


Cobbett  as  Housekeeper 

still  harmonizes  with  and  dominates  the  feeling  of 
the  people,  and  St.  Mark's  at  Venice,  the  religious 
purpose  of  which  is  never  remembered  by  the  crowd 
who  chatter  and  hawk  their  wares  around  it. 


137 


Autography 

SOMEBODY,  noticing  that  I  was  discussing 
the  prices  of  books  and  autographs,  writes  to 
tell  me  that  when  at  school  he  induced  the  late 
Dr.  W.  G.  Grace  to  sign  a  postcard  portrait.  What, 
he  asks,  is  the  market-value  of  this?  I  don't  know. 
I  should  say,  subject  to  correction,  that  it  would  not 
be  worth  more  than  a  few  shillings.  Thousands  of 
small  boys  must  have  written  to  Grace  for*  auto- 
graphs, and  many  no  doubt  got  them.  This  same 
excessive  popularity  will,  I  imagine,  militate  against 
the  value  in  posterity's  eyes  of  many  of  the  signatures 
of  the  contemporary  eminent.  The  autographs  of 
Miss  Edna  May,  Miss  M.  Studholme,  and  Miss  Z. 
Dare,  if  they  acceded  to  a  tenth  of  the  requests  made 
of  them,  must  be  enormously  plentiful. 

This  autograph  business  is  very  queer.  Letters 
or  inscriptions  of  any  interest  signed  by  any  sort  of 
celebrities  always  have  some  market  value.  It  is 
rather  strange,  therefore,  that  one  does  not  hear  of 
ruthlessly  businesslike  persons  —  I  mean  private 
people,  not  recognized  dealers  —  making  systematic 
collections  of  MSS.  by  their  own  contemporaries. 
Occasionally  one  does  encounter  in  the  sale-room  a 
letter  written  by  a  Hving  man  to  a  living  man,  and 
one  often  sees  presentation  copies  of  books  which  a 
138 


Autography 

living  author  has  given  to  a  living  friend.  There 
are,  therefore,  it  seems,  persons  who  are  not  too  timid 
to  sell  people's  autograph  communications  to  them- 
selves with  the  writer's  full  knowledge.  The  sort  of 
speculator  I  have  in  mind  would  not  need  to  do  any- 
thing so  bold  as  that.  All  he  would  do  would  be  to 
lay  in  autographs  as  wine-merchants  lay  In  wines,  and 
let  them  mature  until  the  writers  are  dead.  There 
are  numbers  of  persons  living  from  whom  a  man  of 
any  astuteness  could  elicit  letters,  whose  MSS.  after 
they  are  dead  will  be  as  valuable  as  those  of  the 
"Great  Victorians"  are  now;  and  the  more  exten- 
sive the  speculator's  net  the  more  certain  he  will  be 
of  getting  a  return.  One  can  conceive  a  large  cellar 
of  modern  autographs  of  which  some  would  mature 
every  year  thus  bringing  in  to  its  owner  a  quite  reg- 
ular income.  A  man  with  a  large  acquaintance 
amongst  authors  and  a  mind  of  the  "  real-politik  " 
type  could  do  the  thing  at  the  cost  of  a  very  few 
hours'  labour  a  week. 


139 


A  Forgotten  Caroline 

IN  America  today  literary  research  Is  being  con- 
ducted on  a  scale  unparalleled  In  the  world's 
history.  In  countless  universities  countless  pro- 
fessors and  aspirants  to  the  doctorate  are  writing 
treatises  or  editing  old  books.  A  good  deal  of  the 
work  produced  is  amusingly  pedantic  and  purpose- 
less. People  will  write  long  theses  on  Ten  Solilo- 
quies of  Marlowe  Contrasted  and  Compared  or  The 
Use  of  the  Infinitive  in  Pope's  Homer.  But  often 
these  books  put  readers  of  poetry  deeply  In  the  debt 
of  American  scholarship.  Among  such  Is  Miss 
Eloise  Robinson's  edition  of  Beaumont,  which  is  pub- 
lished under  the  auspices  of  the  Department  of  Eng- 
lish Literature  at  Wellesley  College. 

Joseph  Beaumont,  who  was  born  in  1616  and  died 
in  1699,  was  a  member  of  that  group  of  poets  of 
which  Crashaw,  Vaughan,  and  Traherne  are  more 
celebrated  members.  A  High  Church  clergyman, 
he  was  expelled  from  his  fellowship  at  Cambridge 
under  the  Commonwealth,  returned  to  the  Univer- 
sity after  the  Restoration,  and  ended  his  life  as  Mas- 
ter of  Peterhouse.  His  long  poem  Psyche  was  re- 
printed by  Grosart,  who  also  reprinted  the  selection 
from  his  minor  poems  first  issued  Ini749.  But  the 
140 


A  Forgotten  Caroline 

majority  of  his  minor  poems,  which  exist  in  an  MS. 
owned  by  Professor  G.  H.  Palmer,  of  Harvard,  have 
never  before  been  printed.  Miss  Robinson  has  now 
made  the  whole  of  them  accessible;  and  she  has 
added  bibliographical  and  critical  introductions 
which  leave  nothing  to  be  desired. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  the  discovery  of  these 
poems  is  anything  like  as  important  as  was  that  of 
Traherne's.  A  great  deal  of  the  interest  of  Beau- 
mont's poetry  lies  in  the  sidelight  it  throws  on  the 
general  literary  tendencies  of  the  day  and  on  the 
work  of  his  greater  contemporaries  in  particular. 
His  subject-matter  was  theirs;  his  opinions  were 
theirs;  his  phraseology  was  largely  theirs;  but  com- 
parison of  his  work  with  that  of  Crashaw  and 
Vaughan  shows  how  differently  men  of  differing 
powers  will  work  with  the  same  materials.  He  will 
address  St.  Teresa,  but  not  with  Crashaw's  passion; 
he  will  muse  upon  eternity,  but  not  with  Vaughan's 
vision;  and  the  stock  classical  allusions  to  the  Phoe- 
nix (say)  or  to  Arabia,  which  greater  poets  could  use 
a  hundred  times,  yet  always  with  freshness,  are  with 
him  stock  allusions  and  nothing  more.  All  the  faults 
they  had  Beaumont  had  in  double  measure.  Most 
of  his  poems  did  not  spring  from  the  imagination; 
his  method  rather  was  to  seize  any  event  or  story 
that  happened  to  catch  his  eye  and  batter  his  brains 
for  a  spiritual  analogy  for  it.  His  imagery  was 
sometimes  most  ludicrously  laboured,  "  Whilst  I," 
he  writes  on  his  birthday  (only  his  32nd), 

141 


Books  in  General 

behinde  Me  cast  my  annual  Ey, 
JVhat  do  I  but  my  Sodome  spy! 

O  lamentable  sight 

Which  justly  might 

Not  fix  me  in  a  pile  of  Salt, 

But  all  my  guilty  Essence  melt 
Into  a  flood  of  Pcpuitcnce,  ivhose  Tide 

Might  drown  that  which  is  gone, 

And  let  me  safely  on 
Its  back  unto  the  shore  of  this  Year  ride. 

The  Leviathan,  which  wrenched  from  Vaughan 
his  phrase  "  the  comely  spacious  whale,"  led  Beau- 
mont to  an  equally  unfortunate  effort: 

Thy  Prophet  Thou  didst  summon  from 

His  living  Tombe, 
Where  twice-devoured  He, 
Lay  drowned  both  in  the  Whale,  and  Sea. 

His  image  of  the  Lord  of  Light  passing  through 
"  His  chrystall  Mothers  wombe  "  leaving  her  "  In- 
tirely  whole  "  exactly  anticipates  an  image  that  Gib- 
bon invented  to  ridicule  the  Virgin  Birth,  and  when 
he  set  for  "  a  Base  and  2  Trebles  "  a  lilt  beginning: 

Fond  Syllogismes,  in  vaine 

You  arme  your  Propositions  Three 

Against  Religious  Trinitie. 

And  proceeding  to  discuss  the  "  Angles  in  the  Eter- 
142 


A  Forgotten  Caroline 

nail  Trigon  "  he  was  certainly  writing  for  an  age 
rather  than  for  all  time.  A  great  deal  of  his  verse 
is  not  even  quaint  like  this;  but  much  of  it  is  interest- 
ing and  some  of  the  shorter  lyrics  are  really  beauti- 
ful. The  Relapse,  The  Evening  Hymn,  The  Morn- 
ing Hymn,  The  Alarm,  Games,  The  Duel,  The  Gen- 
tle Check,  Suspirium,  would  all  be  worth  including  in 
a  seventeenth-century  anthology.  So  would  the 
noble  Pretence  (now  first  published),  with  its  exhor- 
tation to  himself  "  to  walk  the  hardy  and  heroik 
Way  "  and  "  By  his  deer  Blood  to  trace  The  gallant 
Footsteps  of  thy  Lordy  It  is  impossible  to  quote 
this  in  full  here,  or  the  exquisite  Easter  Dialogue 
either ;  but  a  few  lines  from  the  latter  will  show  how 
beautiful  it  is.  The  Magdalen  is  weeping  at  the 
tomb.  The  Saviour  appears  and  she  thinks  He  is  a 
gardener: 

Jesus  :     Woman,  to  what  loss  do  thine  Eyes 
Such  full  drink  offerings  sacrifice f 

Magdalene:     Sweet  Gardner,  if  thy  Hand  it 

were 
Which  did  transplant  Him;  Tell  me  where 
Thou  sett'dst  that  pretious  Root  on  whome 
Grow  all  my  Hopes;  and  I  will  from 
That  Soile  remove  him  to  a  Bed 
With  Balme  and  Myrrh  and  Spices  spred. 
Where  by  mine  Eyes  two  Fountains  He 
For  evermore  shall  waterd  be. 


143 


Books  in  General 

Jesus  :     Mary. 

Magdalene  :     O  Master! 

Angel  {ist  and  2nd)  :     With  what  sweet 
Fury  she  flies  at  his  deer  Feet, 
To  weep  and  kiss  out  what  She  by 
Her  Toung  could  never  signify! 

It  was  rarely  that  Beaumont  wrote  lines  as  good  as 
these;  "sweet  fury"  could  have  been  bettered  by 
none  of  his  contemporaries.  He  was  not  built  to 
become  a  great  poet.  Neither  poetic  nor  religious 
ardours  burnt  fiercely  with  him.  Poetry  he  did  not 
consider  his  serious  business,  and,  as  a  rule,  his  self- 
communings  took  the  form  rather  of  a  slightly  com- 
placent self-examination  than  of  real  spiritual  strife. 
He  was  thoroughly  religious,  but  seldom  passionately 
so;  he  revered  the  saints,  but  wrote  of  them  rather  as 
items  in  a  calendar  than  as  suffering  and  aspiring 
human  beings;  he  became  one  of  the  fattest  pluralists 
of  his  day,  and  he  lived  to  a  very  advanced  age  in  full 
possession  of  his  faculties  and  his  emoluments. 


144 


The  Diarist  in  Our  Midst 

MR.  GEORGE  RUSSELL,  who  has  died  un- 
expectedly young  (he  was  66)^  was  one 
of  the  best  of  the  Victorian  diarists.  He 
kept  elaborate  diaries,  and  whenever  he  wanted  to 
write  a  new  book  of  reminiscences  of  the  illustrious, 
all  he  had  to  do  was  to  meander  through  them  and 
pluck  a  sufficiency  of  flowers  by  the  way.  He  was 
not  a  great  wit,  a  great  observer,  or  a  very  vivid  and 
eloquent  writer.  But  he  was  sincere,  had  a  good  eye 
and  an  immense  acquaintance,  and  was  amiable, 
lively  and  readable.  His  diaries  exist :  the  time  may 
come  when  they  will  be  published;  they  may,  for  all  I 
know,  equal  Greville,  though  I  doubt  it.  At  all 
events,  we  cannot  finally  judge  him  by  what  he  has 
written  for  his  contemporaries,  with  whom  a  man  has 
all  sorts  of  reservations,  and  to  whose  ephemeral  in- 
terests (if  he  have  an  eye  on  them)  he  is  liable  to 
cater  in  selecting  his  material.  It  is  possible  that  he 
has  left  something  written  dehberately  for  later  gen- 
erations; but  I  doubt  it,  and  even  if  he  has  it  will 
probably  be  interesting  but  not  a  masterpiece.  For 
his  attention  largely  centred  on  passing  controversies 
and  second-rate  people  temporarily  conspicuous. 

The  diary  takes  all  sorts  of  forms;  a  man  may 
publish  in  his  lifetime  a  biography  which  is  in  essence 
a    diary   meant   for   posterity.     Boswell,    when   he 

145 


Books  in  General 

wrote  Johnson's  life,  did  so  with  the  deliberate  ob- 
ject of  displaying  his  hero  to  succeeding  ages,  and  he 
told  succeeding  ages  precisely  what  they  wanted  to 
know.  Horace  Walpole  composed  his  letters  to  his 
friends  certainly  with  the  object  of  amusing  his 
friends,  but  with  the  equally  clear  object  of  being 
printed  and  read  posthumously.  It  was  a  sense  of 
his  duty  of  satisfying  the  curiosity  of  his  successors 
that  made  Crabb  Robinson  record  all  the  breakfasts 
he  took  with  poets,  painters  and  lawyers;  and  it  was 
certainly  with  an  eye  on  posterity  and  not  on  his  con- 
temporaries (though  his  scheme  of  shorthand  was 
such  that  posterity  might  not  have  bothered  to  pierce 
the  veil  of  his  manuscript)  that  Pepys  made  a  note 
of  all  that  happened  within  his  purview,  from  the 
doings  of  King  Charles  to  those  of  Deb,  the  maid. 
We  are  confronted  almost  daily  with  memoirs  writ- 
ten by  the  living  for  the  living:  "  Things  I  Remem- 
ber," "  Things  I  Can  Tell,"  "  Forty  Years  in  the 
Diplomatic  Circle,"  and  so  on.  But  the  interesting 
figure  is  not  the  superficial  diarist  who  accumulates 
materials  for  a  gossipy  volume  of  reminiscences,  but 
the  sagacious,  the  skilful,  the  dedicated  diarist  who 
makes  his  notes  a  lifelong  work,  cares  little  for  the 
opinion  of  his  contemporaries,  and  means  to  be  read 
"  when  all  the  breathers  of  this  world  are  dead." 
Where  is  he?  He  is  somewhere.  Possibly  at  your 
elbow  now. 

Somewhere  today  the  twentieth  century  diarist  is 
amongst  us.  Nobody  knows  he  is  doing  it;  or  at 
146 


The  Diarist  in  Our  Midst 

least  nobody  guesses,  and  few  try  to  guess,  what  he  is 
putting  down.  He  is  recording  his  impressions  of 
the  war,  of  the  peace  negotiations,  of  the  mind  of  the 
rich  and  the  demonstrations  of  the  poor.  Just  as 
Pepys  wrote  of  London  streets  growing  grassy  dur- 
ing the  Plague,  and  Walpole  described  London  illu- 
minated for  victory  and  London  surging  with  discon- 
tented weavers,  so  he  is  carefully  composing  descrip- 
tions of  this,  that  and  the  other,  of  Armistice  night, 
of  the  opening  of  Parliament,  of  the  railway  strike, 
of  President  Wilson's  drive  to  the  City.  He  may 
himself  have  been  a  special  constable  or  a  temporary 
civil  servant  or  an  organizer  of  Red  Cross  Sales,  in 
which  event  the  personal  narrative  will  blend  with 
the  public  as  Pepys's  does.  He  may  be  an  official 
hke  Charles  Greville,  with  good  opportunities  of  get- 
ting behind  the  scenes:  a  Cabinet  Minister's  secre- 
tary, perhaps.  He  may  be  a  person  of  leisure  who 
knows  everybody.  But  somewhere  he  is  walking 
about.  Very  likely  he  is  quite  an  ordinary-looking 
man,  with  a  bowler  hat,  a  neat  black  overcoat,  a 
small  moustache,  and  hair  growing  grey  at  the  tem- 
ples: familiar  to  the  members  of  various  clubs,  wel- 
comed in  many  houses  as  an  inoffensive  guest,  but  to 
the  general  public  entirely  unknown.  His  picture,  I 
fancy,  once  appeared  in  the  Daily  Mirror,  standing 
In  the  background  behind  several  duchesses,  on  a 
charitable  occasion.  Yet  it  will  be  to  his  writings, 
more  than  to  all  our  contemporary  mass  of  journal- 
ism and  descriptive  fiction,  more  than  to  the  huge 
documented   tomes   of   the   professional   historians, 

147 


Books  in  General 

that  posterity  —  which  means  a  number  of  people 
like  you  and  me  who  do  not  happen  to  be  yet  born  — 
will  go  for  the  most  intimate  and  convincing  accounts 
of  the  public  scene  of  today. 

And  in  his  book  —  or,  if  you  like,  in  their  books 
—  there  will  be  a  good  deal  more  than  this.  The 
diarist  will  make  familiar  to  posterity,  will  even 
bring  into  the  very  foreground  of  our  spectacle  of 
19  19,  persons  who  to  contemporary  eyes  are  ciphers, 
non-existent.  As  we  know  General  Seymour  and 
Topham  Beauclerk,  Bennet  Langton,  Boswell  and 
Sir  W.  Pen,  so  posterity  will  see,  walking  most  con- 
spicuously about  our  streets,  little  Mr.  Jones,  of 
whom  nobody  but  the  diarist  Is  aware.  Posterity 
will  read,  and  imagine  to  have  been  on  the  lips  of  all 
our  generation,  the  witticisms  of  that  young  man, 
who  is  unknown  save  at  a  few  dinner-tables  In  vari- 
ous capitals.  The  diarist  is  noting  these,  following 
his  game  with  scrutinizing  eyes  and  a  concealed  pen- 
cil. He  Is  most  carefully  putting  down  all  those 
epigrams  and  satirical  verses  about  the  Great  which 
go  from  lip  to  lip,  but  which  no  one  is  ever  traitor 
enough  to  put  into  print.  He  is  smilingly  rectifying 
the  reputations  of  politicians  and  men  of  affairs: 
setting  irretrievably  down  the  things  they  say  about 
each  other,  about  their  opponents,  about  the  meas- 
ures they  are  supposed  to  support,  about  their  con- 
stituents. He  lunches  and  dines  with  men  of  letters; 
he  knows  their  weaknesses  and  their  hostilities. 
And  here  and  there  he  knows  a  man  of  genius,  rela- 
148 


The  Diarist  in  Our  Midst 

tively  obscure  to  us,  but  to  posterity  as  interesting  as 
Keats  or  Shelley  is  to  ourselves;  he  is  cherishing  the 
observation  of  such  men  on  their  art,  recording  their 
facial  expressions,  receiving  their  confessions,  their 
admissions,  and  their  contentions :  giving  himself,  in 
fact,  harmless  amusement  which  posterity  will  regard 
as  an  inestimable  service.  And,  incidentally,  pos- 
sibly with  full  consciousness,  and  (if  he  be  a  person 
now  regarded  as  an  amiable  nonentity)  with  a  pleas- 
ant self-satisfaction  at  thus  building  himself  a  monu- 
ment over-topping  those  of  the  "  famous  in  their 
day,"  he  is  guaranteeing  his  own  fame.  ...  I  hope 
he  exists. 

\ 
But  I  don't  know  who  he  is.      Sometimes  I  suspect 

one  man  and  sometimes  another.  There  is  a  little 
man  I  occasionally  play  cards  with  who  looks  a  likely 
candidate;  there  is  a  superannuated  politician  whom 
I  sometimes  fancy;  there  is  a  man  of  letters,  long 
eminent,  of  whom  I  feel  that  he  may  posthumously 
crown  a  career  already  great  with  a  diary  immeasur- 
ably finer  than  anything  that  he  has  done.  It  does 
not  do  to  linger  on  this  subject  too  long:  or  one  be- 
gins choosing  one's  words,  and  even  one's  company, 
lest  one  should  go  down  to  posterity  pilloried  in 
some  foolish  sentence,  a  prize  ass.  But  I  cannot 
help  occasionally  returning  to  it.  For,  important 
though  we  may  be  in  our  time,  urgent  though  our 
businesses  may  be,  in  the  latter  end  we  shall  be  food 
for  worms  —  and  for  diarists. 


149 


A  Parody  in  Slang 


I  HAVE  excavated  from  a  drawer  a  yellow  cut- 
ting I  made  from  some  American  newspaper 
before  the  war.  The  journal  had  offered  a 
prize  for  a  translation  of  Heine's  Lorelei,  and  one 
of  the  competitors  submitted  this:  — 

/  sure  wish  some  guy'd  put  me  jerry 
To  what  put  the  jinx  on  my  grin. 

Some  stuff  that's  as  ancient  as  Perry 
Is  buzzin'  around  in  my  bean. 

It's  time  for  the  glims,  and  it's  chilly 

There  ain't  no  wild  waves  on  the  Rhine; 

And,  bo,  take  a  slant  at  that  hill.     He 
'S  lit  up  like  a  booze-parlour  sign. 

A  swell-lookin'  Jane  there  is  sittin' 

And  flashin'  a  bushel  of  rocks; 
Dolled  up  in  her  glad  rags,  loose  fittin' 

She  chases  the  comb  thro'  her  locks. 

And  zvhile  with  that  14  K.  harrow 

She  gives  her  alfalfa  the  drag. 
She  spiels  like  a  white-necktie  sparrow 

A  classy  young  raggety-rag. 
150 


A  Parody  in  Slang 

The  guy  in  his  one-lunger  dingey 

Goes  nuts  on  her  musical  game, 
And  bumps  on  a  rock  with  a  bing.     He 

Just  can't  get  his  lamps  off  that  dame. 

I'll  bet  you  a  bone  to  a  marble 

He's  going  to  land  in  the  drink; 
And  it's  Lorelei's  fancy  old  warble 

That  put  him  for  keeps  on  the  blink. 

I  am  not  competent  to  supply  glossary  and  annota- 
tions to  this,  but  any  one  who  compares  it  with  the 
original  will  find  that  it  is  a  very  close  version  indeed. 


151 


Dialect  in  Literature 

RECENTLY  a  writer  in  the  Times  reviewed  a 
new  book  by  Mr.  J.  S.  Fletcher,  the  York- 
shire author,  who  has  written  many  readable 
novels.  The  point  about  the  new  book  (It  is  in 
verse,  but  that  does  not  greatly  signify)  is  that  It  Is 
written  in  Yorkshire  dialect.  This  appeared  greatly 
to  cheer  the  Times  reviewer.  "  There  are,"  he  said, 
"  unmistakablel  signs,  from  Shetland  to  Cornwall, 
that  dialect  poetry  Is  now  appreciated.  Mr.  Bur- 
gess, the  Shetlander,  has  now  a  sheaf  of  slim  volumes 
to  his  name,  as  has  also  Mr.  Bernard  Gilbert,  the 
Lincolnshire  poet;  and  the  recent  publication  of  Mr. 
Bernard  Moore's  A  Cornish  Chorus  Is  another  indi- 
cation that  the  idiom  and  tonality  of  modern  English 
dialects  are  appreciated  by  others  as  well  as  by  the 
upland  folk  In  whose  speech  they  are  written.  Most 
modern  dialect  poets  unlock  their  word-hoard  In 
lyrical  form.  It  Is  hard  to  say  why  they  should 
choose  this  form  of  expression.  .  .  .  Leet  Livvy  Is 
a  fine  achievement  in  modern  dialect  literature,  and 
whilst  It  adds  fresh  lustre  to  the  author's  fame,  it 
Illuminates  the  dialect  and  proves  it  to  be  a  fitting 
garment  for  narrative  poetry.  If  it  prove  to  be  the 
begetter  of  a  further  line  of  longer  poems  written  in 
modern  English  dialects.  It  will  do  more  than  we  con- 
fidently hope."  I  read  this;  I  have  read  some  of  the 
152 


Dialect  in  Literature 

books  referred  to,  though  not  the  "  sheaf  of  sHm  vol- 
umes "  of  the  Shetlander.  I  had  before  me  a  quota- 
tion from  Mr.  Fletcher,  beginning: 

For  I  haate  her  waur  nor  iver 

but  shoo  pulls,  shoo  pulls,  all  t'  saame. 

And  I  began  wondering  whether  I  shared  that  "  con- 
fident hope."     I  do  not  think  I  do. 

I  daresay  that  I  start  with  a  prejudice  that  many- 
people  probably  share,  arising  from  the  fact  that  I 
instinctively  shirk  dialect  painfully  transferred  into 
print.  Barnes,  of  Dorsetshire  (who  wanted  to  call 
an  omnibus  a  folk-wain),  was  a  man  of  genius,  but 
I  am  sure  he  would  be  far  more  widely  read  had  he 
written  in  English  instead  of  in  broad  Dorset. 
Burns's  dialect  is,  though  in  many  of  his  best  things 
he  does  not  carry  it  uncomfortably  far,  an  obstacle 
to  readers  south  of  the  border.  Tennyson's  experi- 
ments in  Lincolnshire  look  so  terrifying  that  the 
reader  turns  the  pages  until  he  comes  again  to  the 
language  which,  after  all,  Tennyson  himself  spoke. 
Directly  I  see  "  haate  "  with  a  diaeresis  I  visualize 
the  author,  himself  in  most  cases  a  person  who  pro- 
nounces hate  as  I  do,  and  certainly  one  who  has  been 
trained  to  write  it  as  I  do,  laboriously  repeating  the 
local  pronunciation  to  himself  and  trying  with  his 
dots  and  his  broadened  vowels  to  represent  it  pho- 
netically. My  eye  is  hurt;  the  spelling  gets  in  the 
way  of  the  meaning  (which,  we  should  not  forget,  is 

153 


Books  in  General 

of  prime  importance)  and  I  tire.  The  man  who 
writes  in  dialect,  that  is  to  say  who  does  the  thing 
thoroughly,  is  deliberately  limiting  his  audience. 
And,  in  most  cases,  when  he  has  narrowed  it,  he  does 
not  reach  the  people  who  speak  the  pure  dialect  that 
he  is  recording,  but  only  educated  people  who  have 
a  taste  for  the  curious,  or  a  theory  about  the  value  of 
dialect.  Both  in  verse  and  prose  I  think  that  both 
author  and  reader  alike  are  spared  much  unnecessary 
trouble,  and  a  far  wider  audience  may  be  reached,  if 
local  or  personal  differences  in  speech  are  indicated 
only  by  occasional  words  and  turns  of  phrase.  A 
tinge  is  enough.  It  is  maddening  to  read  a  novel  in 
which  the  fact  that  one  of  the  characters  speaks 
Cockney  leads  to  every  page  being  sprinkled  with 
distorted  vowels,  apostrophes  and  misplaced  "  h's." 

The  question  is  ably  and  broadly  discussed  in  a 
chapter  of  Mr.  G.  Gregory  Smith's  new  book,  Scot- 
tish Literature  (Macmillan) .  Mr.  Gregory  Smith 
appears  to  share  the  views  I  have  expressed  above; 
he  also  makes  the  point,  which  must  appeal  strongly 
to  one  who  (Hke  myself)  has  just  promenaded  Scot- 
land, that  dialect  literature,  if  the  theorists  carry 
out  their  theories,  means  an  immense  amount  of  sub- 
division. It  is  no  good  composing  something  you 
think  is  Scotch  and  writing  in  it,  if  you  wish  to  be 
accurate.  The  Scotch  of  Glasgow,  the  Scotch  of 
Roxburghshire,  the  Scotch  of  Skye  and  the  Scotch  of 
Aberdeen  are  not  one  thing;  there  is  even  a  differ- 
ence   (I  am  credibly  told)   between  the  pronuncia- 

154 


Dialect  in  Literature 

tion  of  various  towns  on  the  Clyde  but  a  few  miles 
from  each  other,  though  this  difference  is,  I  confess, 
not  perceptible  to  the  naked  ear  of  an  Englishman. 
Mr.  Gregory  Smith  makes  sport  with  the  enthusiasts 
who  jumble  all  Scots  dialects  together  "  and  trans- 
late the  whole  into  '  fonetik  '  for  '  scientific  '  use  on 
Teutonic  gramophones."  He  defends  "  the  delicate 
colouring  of  standard  English  with  northern  tints," 
and  I  think  that  what  holds  good  for  Scotland  holds 
good  also  for  Devonshire.  We  have  standardized 
our  spelling  throughout  these  islands  —  it  was  not  so 
standardized  in  the  times  of  James  I.  and  Sir  David 
Lyndsay.  Write  down  a  word  like  "  worm  "  and 
that  actual  spelling  represents  different  things  to  dif- 
ferent people.  To  an  educated  Englishman  the 
"  r  "  scarcely  exists  in  the  sound  of  it;  to  the  Scot  the 
word  represents  "  wurrum  " ;  to  various  English 
yokels  other  varieties  of  pronunciation  are  auto- 
matically suggested.  If  we  are  familiar  with  the 
dialect  of  a  district  or  a  kingdom,  the  "  tinge  "  will 
suffice  to  give  us  the  local  colour  throughout,  as  it 
does  in  the  works  of  many  modern  Irish  writers  who 
do  not  distort  the  spelling  of  every  English  word 
they  use. 

If  we  are  not  thus  familiar  I  doubt  if  any  amount 
of  laboured  orthography  will  convey  the  real  thing 
to  us,  and  few  of  us  will  take  the  trouble  to  search 
for  it.  After  all,  though  the  author  of  Piers  Plow- 
man was  right  in  using  the  dialect  of  his  time  and 
place  and  could  not  help  so  doing,  it  cannot  be  dis- 

155 


Books  in  General 

puted  that  more  people  would  read  him  and  enjoy 
him  if  he  had  contrived  to  write  English  as  we  know 
it.  I  would  be  a  pity  were  our  local  pronunciations 
to  fade;  and  I  do  not  think  they  will.  But  let  us 
have  a  uniform  spelling,  and  do  not  let  us  start  en- 
couraging the  gifted  young  in  Staffordshire,  Cheshire, 
and  Rutland  to  turn  their  backs  on  the  spelling  they 
have  learnt  and  begin  writing  their  epics  and  ro- 
mances In  something  that  looks  to  us  like  Polish. 
For  if  so  they  will  hamper  themselves  by  the  unnat- 
ural constraint  and  prevent  most  of  us  from  reading 
them.  The  one  advantage  of  a  general  use  of  dia- 
lect would  be  that  it  would  finally  demonstrate  to  our 
obtuse  Simplified  Spellers  how  impossible  it  is  to  get 
a  standard  phonetic  spelling  of  English  when  we 
have  no  standard  pronunciation,  and  when,  in  many 
cases,  a  provincial  pronunciation  is  near  the  present 
spelling  of  a  word  whilst  the  current  educated  pro- 
nunciation of  it  is  not. 


156 


Greene's  Groatsworth 

MR.  BLACKWELL  of  Oxford  has  for  some 
years  been  producing  cheap  modern  books 
very  tastefully.  Their  contents  have  not 
invariably  commended  themselves  to  all  of  us,  but 
even  where  the  verse  has  been  immature  the  cover- 
papers  have  always  been  ingenious  and  sometimes  de- 
lightful and  the  type  of  paper  far  above  the  standard 
usually  reached  by  those  of  such  cheap  books.  This 
enterprising  publisher,  who  is  all  the  more  interest- 
ing in  that  he  conducts  his  operations  from  what 
Oxonians  may  pardon  me  for  describing  as  a  provin- 
cial town,  is  now  bringing  all  his  arts  to  bear  on  the 
production  of  small  reprints  which,  either  for  ap- 
pearance or  textual  character,  cannot  easily  be  par- 
alleled. The  first  three  were  all  translations;  the 
fourth  is  Greene's  Groatsworth  of  JVit.  This  small 
book  is  here  printed  in  black  and  red  on  excellent 
paper,  anci  bound  as  though  it  were  really  an  amus- 
ing book  and  not  a  work  of  reference  for  scholars. 
And  it  is  an  amusing  book. 

Robert  Greene  the  playwright  was  born  in  1560, 
went  to  Cambridge,  married  in  1585-6,  deserted  his 
wife,  who  had  borne  him  one  child,  went  to  the  devil, 
wrote  profusely,  and  died  at  the  age  of  thirty-two  in 

157 


Books  in  General 

miserable  poverty.  The  Groatsworth  of  Wit  was 
published  posthumously  in  1592.  The  most  famous 
thing  in  it  is  the  passage  which  is  supposed,  with 
every  probability,  to  refer  to  William  Shakespeare. 
Of  him  Greene,  and  his  companions,  Nashe  and 
Lodge,  who  were  scholars  and  not  actors,  and  may 
not  have  liked  being  eclipsed  even  by  a  greater  than 
they,  were  very  likely  at  once  contemptuous  and  en- 
vious. The  reference  occurs  in  the  course  of  a  gen- 
eral denunciation  of  mummers,  "  those  puppets  (I 
mean)  that  speak  from  our  mouths,  those  antics  gar- 
nished in  our  colours  "  : 

"  Yes,  trust  them  not :  for  there  is  an  upstart  crow 
beautiful  with  our  feathers,  that  with  his  tyger's 
head,  wrapt  in  a  player's  hide,  supposes  he  is  as  well 
able  to  bombast  out  a  blank  verse  as  the  best  of  you; 
and  being  an  absolute  Johannes  Factotum,  is  in  his 
own  conceit  the  only  Shake-scene  in  a  country.  Oh, 
that  I  might  intreat  your  rare  wits  to  be  employed 
in  more  profitable  courses:  and  let  these  apes  imi- 
tate your  past  excellence,  and  never  more  acquaint 
them  with  your  admired  inventions." 

Macaulay,  employing  upon  Greene's  coloured 
prose  the  analytical  method  that  he  favoured  when 
people  mixed  their  metaphors,  might  have  made  con- 
siderable play  with  these  sentences.  They  are 
highly  zoological;  they  almost  supply  a  menagerie  in 
themselves.  One  of  the  apes  is  an  upstart  crow 
with  a  tyger's  head;  the  compost  reminds  one  of  the 
158 


Greene's  Groatsworth 

worst  conjectures  of  ancient  Egyptian  theology. 
Scholars  have  supposed  that  the  "  tyger's  head  " 
should  really  be  a  tyger's  heart;  a  man  is  certainly 
more  likely  to  have  a  hide  over  his  heart  than 
over  his  head.  The  allusion  is  to  a  line  in  Henry 
VL 

This  passage  comes  in  the  middle  of  an  appendix 
which  he'  introduces  with  "  Albeit  weakness  will 
scarce  suffer  me  to  write,  yet  to  my  fellow  scholars 
about  this  city  will  I  direct  these  few  ensuing  lines." 
It  is  to  be  hoped  that  some  at  least  of  them  profited 
by  their  friend's  experience.  There  is  little  evidence 
that  Nashe  did,  but  we  may  at  least  be  allowed  to 
hope,  for  Greene's  sake,  that  his  exhortations  did 
something  for  Lodge,  who  lived  to  a  ripe  and  unpro- 
ductive old  age.  There  follows  the  fable  of  the  ant 
and  the  grasshopper,  who,  like  poor  Greene  himself, 
*'  died  comfortless  without  remedy  " ;  and  then,  "  be- 
seeching them  that  shall  bury  my  body,  to  publish 
this  last  farewell,  written  with  my  wretched  hand," 
he  proceeds  to  humble  himself  before  his  wife  and 
entreat  her  forgiveness,  a  most  moving  confession 
ending,  "  Thy  repentant  husband  for  his  disloyalty, 
Robert  Greene." 

These  be  the  appendices,  historically  very  Interest- 
ing; the  main  pamphlet  (it  is  no  more)  relates  the 
story  of  one  Roberto  and  his  brother,  who  are  ruined 
by  extravagance  and  vice.  It  is  a  thin  tale,  but  the 
moral,  however  obviously,  is  sincerely  preached,  and 

159 


Books  in  General 

the  prose  Is  muscular,  vivid  and  melodious.  The  in- 
troduction, effective  enough,  is  in  a  modified  euphuis- 
tic  style.  It  opens  (fori  Greene,  unlike  modern 
novelists,  wrote  for  the  male  reader)  : 

"Gentlemen, —  The  swan  sings  melodiously  be- 
fore death,  that  in  all  his  lifetime  useth  but  a  jarring 
sound.  Greene,  though  able  enough  to  write,  yet 
deeplyer  searched  with  sickness  than  ever  heretofore, 
sends  you  his  swan-like  song,  for  that  he  fears  he 
shall  never  again  carol  to  you  wonted  love-lays,  never 
again  discover  to  you  youth's  pleasures.  However 
yet  sickness,  riot,  incontinence,  have  at  once  shown 
their  extremity,  yet,  if  I  recover,  you  shall  all  see 
more  fresh  springs  than  ever  sprang  from  me,  direct- 
ing you  how  to  live,  yet  not  dissuading  you  from  love. 
This  is  the  last  I  have  writ;  and,  I  fear  me,  the  last  I 
shall  write." 

The  antithetical  mode  of  writing  Is  deserted  di- 
rectly the  narrative  is  begun. 

What  unmistakable  charm,  what  an  atmosphere 
about  the  very  first  sentence :  — 

"  In  an  Island  bound  with  the  ocean,  there  was 
sometime  a  City  situated,  made  rich  by  merchandize, 
and  populous  by  long  space;  the  name  Is  not  men- 
tioned in  the  antiquary,  or  else  worn  out  by  Time's 
antiquity,  what  it  was  it  greatly  skills  not;  but  therein 
thus  it  happened." 
1 60 


Greene's  Groatsworth 

What  happened  was  that  there  was  an  old  miser  with 
two  sons. 

"  Wise  he  was,  for  he  bare  office  in  his  parish,  and 
sat  as  formally  in  his  fox-furred  gown  as  if  he  had 
been  a  very  upright  dealing  burgess:  he  was  reli- 
gious too;  never  without  a  book  at  his  belt,  and  a 
bolt  in  his  mouth,  ready  to  shoot  through  his  sinful 
neighbour." 

Languishing  in  Death,  the  old  man  addresses  his 
two  sons,  one  a  stupid  materialist,  the  other  (Rob- 
erto, to  wit)  a  scholar  who  contemns  wealth.  The 
old  man  says,  with  the  quaintest  turn  of  speech,  that 
he  has  been  unable  to  entreat,  cozen  or  bribe  Death: 

*'  In  brief,  I  think  he  hath  with  this  fool  my  eldest 
son  been  brought  up  in  the  University,  and  therefore 
accounts  that  in  riches  is  no  virtue." 

Thus  he  proceeds  until  he  complains  of  an  inward 
pang: 

"  '  I,  father,'  said  Roberto,  '  it  is  the  worm  of 
conscience  that  urges  you  at  the  last  hour  to  remem- 
ber your  life,  that  eternal  life  may  follow  your  re- 
pentance.' 'Out  fool!  '  said  this  miserable  father, 
'  I  feel  it  now,  it  was  only  a  stitch,'  " 

The  old  man  dies  and  the  two  brothers  wander  off 
to  a  light  o'  love's  where  the  younger  is  ensnared  — 

i6i 


Books  in  General 

to  lose  all  his  substance  in  two  years,  ending  no 
richer  than  his  improvident  brother  who  had  but  a 
groat.  The  story,  although  short,  wanders  and 
digresses.  The  lady  tells,  for  instance,  a  fable  of 
no  particular  value  about  a  Fox  —  who,  to  secure 
his  private  ends,  "  made  a  friday  face,  counterfeiting 
sorrow."  "  Friday,"  spelt  with  a  small  "  f  "  and 
used  as  an  adjective,  looks  odd  and  delightful  to  our 
eyes.  The  adjectival  usage  is  not  entirely  analogous 
to  that  in  the  phrase  "  Sunday  clothes,"  which  is  to 
be  taken  literally.  The  book  is  full  of  little  fla- 
voured phrases  like  this,  and  you  find  them  every- 
where in  Greene's  wTitings.  In  them,  as  in  minor 
Elizabethan  prose  and  plays  generally,  you  get  a 
closer  and  fresher  view  of  the  life  of  the  time  than  in 
greater  works  and  the  lyrics  which  are  all  that  most 
people  read. 


162 


James  Whitcomb  Riley 

IN  bed,  with  a  high  temperature,  and  all  the  re- 
pellent attributes  of  forehead,  eyes,  mouth,  and 
back  which  are  described  in  patent  medicine  ad- 
vertisements, I  had  not  lived,  during  the  week,  a 
strenuous  intellectual  life.  At  rare  intervals,  and 
for  two  or  three  minutes  at  a  time,  my  leaden  eyelids 
had  lifted  and  I  had  taken  in  a  few  lines  of  Buried 
Alive  and  A  Rebows,  which,  for  some,  or  no,  reason, 
found  themselves  side  by  side  on  my  table.  Being 
utterly  incapable  of  thought,  I  was  just  wondering 
from  which  of  these  two  books  I  should  quote  a  few 
passages  which,  with  some  perfunctory  praise  or  con- 
demnation, would  fill  a  yawning  page,  when  one  came 
into  my  bedroom  and  told  me  that  the  Times  had  an 
obituary  notice  of  James  Whitcomb  Riley.  The  old 
man,  it  seems,  had  joined  the  great  majority  a  few 
days  before  myself;  and  I  had  my  selections  from 
Riley  brought  up,  as  also  a  volume  of  the  Encyclo- 
paedia, to  refresh  my  memory.  For  the  only  line  of 
Riley's  that  I  could  recall  in  my  condition  was  one 
which  I  have  quoted  before:  "The  beetle  booms 
adown  the  glooms  and  bumps  along  the  dusk,"  and 
which  could  scarcely  be  considered  representative. 

Riley,   hke   Joaquin  Miller   and  other  American 
bards  of  the  t}^pe,  probably  had  many  amiable  qual- 

163 


Books  in  General 

ities.  I  should  think  he  would  have  made  a  very 
kind,  though  a  too  voluble,  grandfather.  But  he 
was  a  very  bad  writer.  And  his  badness  was  "  of 
various  kinds."  In  the  volume  I  open  the  first  poem 
is  called  A  Life  Lesson.     It  begins :  — 

There!  little  girl,  don't  cry! 

They  have  broken  your  doll,  I  know; 
And  your  tea-set  blue, 
And  your  play-house,  too, 
Are  things  of  the  long  ago; 
But  childish  troubles  will  soon  pass  by  — 
There!  little  girl,  don't  cry! 

In  the  next  verse  it  is  her  slate  that  is  broken;  in  the 
last  (need  I  say  it?),  her  heart.  Perhaps  what  the 
Encyclopaedia  writer  calls  his  "  naive  humour  and 
tenderness  "  may  be  held  to  be  illustrated  here. 
But  naivete  may  be  carried  too  far.  A  few  pages 
later  on  there  is  a  lyric  called  A  Song,  which,  though 
it  might  elicit  storms  of  applause  in  a  West-end 
music-hall,  could  hardly  be  held,  by  even  the  most 
tolerant  of  critics,  to  justify  a  claim  to  immortal 
bays.     The  text  is:  — 

There  is  ever  a  song  somewhere,  my  dear; 
There  is  ever  a  something  sings  alway. 

And  the  chorus  is  certainly  as  good  a  model  for  that 
kind  of  journalist  who  is,  like  myself,  paid  by  space, 
as  anything  I've  ever  seen:  — 
164 


James  Whitcomb  Riley 

There  is  a  song  somewhere,  my  dear, 
Be  the  skies  above  or  dark  or  fair, 

There  is  ever  a  song  that  our  hearts  may  hear. 
There  is  ever  a  song  somewhere,  my  dear. 
There  is  ever  a  song  somewhere! 

On  the  whole  I  think  I  prefer  Riley's  dialect 
poems,  even  though  they  do  occasionally  present  an 
English  reader  with  such  problems  as  the  word 
"  lightning-bug,"  which  I  very  timidly  hazard  may 
be  Hoosier  for  glowworm,  though  without  confi- 
dence enough  to  bet  on  it.  The  more  conventional 
poems  are  free  from  this  kind  of  difficulty,  though 
I  am  rather  puzzled  by  a  being  with  :  — 

a  plume  of  red, 
That  spurted  about  in  the  breeze  and  bled 
In  the  bloom  of  the  every  lad. 

As  a  rule  the  difficulty  with  these  poems  does  not  lie 
In  particular  words.  Where  It  does  lie  may  be  In- 
dicated if  I  quote  the  last  stanza  of  an  endeavour  to 
expand  and  presumably  to  Improve  the  nursery 
rhyme  of  Curly  Locks: 

And  feast  upon  strawberries,  sugar  and  cream 
From  a  service  of  silver,  with  jewels  agleam. 
At  thy  feet  will  I  bide,  at  thy  beck  will  I  rise. 
And  twinkle  my  soul  in  the  light  of  thine  eyes! 

Well,  really!     Goodness  only  knows  what  sort  of 

165 


Books  in  General 

picture  the  poet  meant  to  "  conjure  up  "  by  that  last 
line.  Is  "  twinkle  "  here  a  verb  transitive  or  intran- 
sitive? 

Take   this   again:   the   first   two   stanzas   of    The 
Funny  Little  Fellow:  — 

'Twas  a  Funny  little  Fellow 

Of  the  very  purest  type, 
For  he  had  a  heart  as  mellow 

As  an  apple  over-ripe; 
And  the  brightest  little  twinkle 

When  a  funny  thing  occurred, 
And  the  lightest  little  tinkle 

Of  a  laugh  you  ever  heard/ 

His  smile  was  like  the  glitter 

Of  the  sun  in  tropic  lands 
And  his  talk  a  sweeter  twitter 

Than  the  swallow  understands; 
Hear  him  sing  —  and  tell  a  story  — 

Snap  a  joke  —  ignite  a  pun, 
'Twas  a  capture  —  rapture  —  glory, 

And  explosion  —  all  in  one! 

I  cannot  enter  into  details,  or  it  might  be  possible 
to  inquire  whether  it  is  really  complimentary  to  a 
person  to  compare  his  smile  to  a  tropical  sun,  or  his 
heart  to  an  over-ripe  apple.  Whether  the  poet  in- 
tended the  additional  dubious  compliment  of  com- 
paring his  friend's  singing  to  an  explosion  can  only 
i66 


James  Whitcomb  Riley 

be  decided  by  an  authoritative  elucidation  of  his 
rather  hectic  punctuation.  But  the  stanzas  illus- 
trate very  well  what  was  really  wrong  with  Riley;  it 
was  not  that  he  was  too  naive,  but  that  he  wasn't 
naive  enough.  He  was  sophisticated  without  being 
intelligent.  He  was  always  self-conscious,  whether 
he  was  attempting  to  write  as  he  conceived  that  other 
poets  had  written,  or  whether  he  was  setting  out  to 
interpret  the  feelings  of  the  strong  and  simple  folk 
of  the  prairie. 

I  find  that  the  Encyclopadia  appears  to  regard  as 
one  of  Riley's  principal  feats  an  imitation  of  Poe 
that  he  published  in  the  Anderson  Democrat.  It 
had  the  Initials  "  E.  A.  P."  under  it;  it  was  alleged 
by  the  editor  to  have  been  found  "  on  the  fly-leaf  of 
an  old  Latin-English  dictionary  "  then  owned  by  "  an 
uneducated  and  illiterate  man "  In  Kokomo,  who 
had  received  It  from  his  grandfather,  in  whose  tav- 
ern, near  Richmond,  Va.,  it  had  been  left  by  "  a 
young  man  who  showed  plainly  the  marks  of  dissipa- 
tion " ;  and  It  deceived  many  distinguished  critics.  I 
have  not  seen  this  work,  though  I  can  quite  well 
imagine  what  It  must  be  like.  But  I  cannot  conceive 
that  anything  of  Riley's  could  really  make  it  worth 
the  Times'  while  to  speculate,  as  It  did,  whether 
Riley  would  live  or  not.  Its  conclusion,  that  he  has 
as  much  chance  of  living  as  many  others,  was  at 
least  cautious,  but  on  the  whole  I  incline  to  think  that 
the  Times  writer,  like  myself,  had  had  to  go  to  the 
Encyclopedia  for  his  facts,  and  that,  unlike  myself, 

167 


Books  in  General 

he  had  never  read  any  Riley.  For  the  sober  truth  Is 
that  the  "  Hoosler  poet "  was  neither  a  better  nor  a 
worse  writer  than  Mrs.  Wheeler  Wilcox,  and  that 
both  owe  their  popularity  to  the  same  qualities. 
Mr.  G.  R.  Sims  is  at  least  as  good,  though  he  doesn't 
borrow  quite  so  many  conventional  pretty-pretties  to 
adorn  his  verse. 


i68 


Edinburgh:  the  Missing 
Monument 

How  a  man  of  letters  must  respect  the 
Scotch!  No  other  people,  not  excepting 
the  ancient  Athenians  or  the  modern  Bos- 
tonians,  have  so  respected  men  of  letters.  Waiters, 
navvies  and  bagmen,  who  were  they  born  English 
would  never  have  heard  of  Dickens  or  Tennyson, 
seem  familiar  with  every  circumstance  in  the  lives, 
as  well  as  the  works,  of  Scott  and  Burns,  Any  man 
within  fifty  miles  of  Scott's  numerous  homes  can  tell 
you  the  way  to  it  and  possibly  (though  I  did  not  test 
this) I  the  charge  for  admission;  and  an  author  in 
Edinburgh  feels  that  he  has  reached  the  author's 
Paradise.  Here  do  the  poet,  even  the  minor  poet, 
and  the  novelist  come  Into  their  own;  streets,  hotels, 
stations,  are  named  in  their  honour;  their  memories 
are  omnipresent  and  their  monuments  vie  with  the 
grandest.  It  is  a  great  and  a  beautiful  city;  I  can 
find  only  one  (barring  the  Sunday  closing)  fault  with 
It.  I  put  it  as  a  question.  Why  has  Edinburgh  no 
monument,  or  rather  no  noticeable  monument,  to 
Stevenson  ? 

I  should  think  that  there  is  no  town  in  the  world 
which  has  so  much  commemorative  architecture  and 

169 


Books  in  General 

sculpture  to  the  square  mile  as  Edinburgh.  For 
more  than  a  century  its  inhabitants  have  been  pos- 
sessed with  a  delightful  mania  for  beautifying  the 
promenades  of  the  living  and  celebrating  the  virtues 
of  the  dead.  The  hills  of  the  City  are  thickly  clad 
with  feudal  battlements  and  Grecian  porticoes. 
You  will  see  the  dawn  through  an  open  classic  ar- 
cade, the  mid-day  orb  over  a  mediaeval  keep,  the 
sunset  fretted  with  Gothic  spires  and  towers.  There 
are  vast  circular  halls  that  might  have  pleased  Jus- 
tinian, tall  columns  that  might  have  excited  the  envy 
of  Trajan,  the  fluted  pillar,  the  arch,  the  broken 
pediment,  the  cross,  the  obelisk:  and  almost  all  are 
memorials.  So  also.  In  the  nature  of  things,  are  the 
statues.  These  are  In  number  as  the  sands  of  the 
sea.  They  throng  the  gardens  of  Prince's-street, 
the  squares,  the  facades  of  public  buildings;  no  eli- 
gible crossroad  or  patch  of  sky  suitable  for  silhouet- 
ting lacks  Its  doctor  in  marble  or  Its  philanthropist 
in  bronze.  There  are  soldiers,  some;  lawyers,  phy- 
sicians and  theologians,  many.  There  are  also  men 
of  letters  and  philosophers.  Most,  naturally,  are 
Scotsmen.  Wellington  and  Nelson  are  exceptions: 
of  the  former  there  Is  an  equestrian  bronze,  and  the 
monument  of  Nelson  Is  the  Kew  Pagoda  of  Edin- 
burgh as  the  Scott  Monument  Is  the  Albert  Memo-' 
rial.  Even  the  enthusiastic  writer  who,  for  me,  depu- 
tized the  late  Baedeker,  could  find  no  more  to  say  of 
it  than  that  it  is  "  a  structure  more  like  an  observa- 
tory or  a  lighthouse  than  a  monument."  Abraham 
Lincoln  has  a  monument,  and  eke  George  IV.,  the 
170 


The  Missing  Monument 

justification  for  this,  apparently,  being  that  he  once 
visited  Edinburgh.  Charles  II.  and  Prince  Albert 
stand  in  these  streets,  Livingstone  and  Pitt,  David 
Hume,  Dugald  Stewart,  Allan  Ramsay,  "  Christo- 
pher North,"  two  publishers  and  a  dog  that  died  of 
grief.  Royal  personages  sometimes  excepted,  no 
doubt  all  these  excellent  men,  as  also  the  animal,  de- 
served well  of  Edinburgh,  and  of  the  human  race. 
The  more  memorials  the  merrier,  if  the  commem- 
orated be  worthy;  Edinburgh  has  been  prolific  of  tal- 
ent and  virtue,  and  she  is  a  perfect  frame  for  monu- 
mental art.  Moreover,  she  cannot  be  accused,  in  a 
general  way  of  doing  otherwise  than  handsomely  by 
literature.  The  Scott  Monument  is  only  less  con- 
spicuous than  the  Castle,  which  has  an  unfair  pull 
owing  to  its  eminence;  and  if  a  Greek  peripteral  tem- 
ple is  not  quite  the  most  congruous  of  conceivable 
memorials  to  Burns,  the  Burns  Monument  was  at 
least  well  meant,  is  large  and  conspicuous,  and,  at  a 
distance,  looks  uncommonly  well.  But  where  is 
Stevenson? 

I  do  not  suggest  that  Edinburgh,  merely  because 
it  is  the  capital  town,  should  possess  a  statue  of  every 
Scottish  worthy  who  ever  existed.  She  need  not 
have  had  a  statue  of  James  Watt,  who  could  reason- 
ably be  left  to  Glasgow  and  Greenock.  If  she  has 
no  statue  —  and  there  may  be  one  —  to  James 
Hogg,  the  Ettrick  Shepherd,  after  all,  kept  sheep  in 
Ettrick  and  now  cows  in  the  Cowgate.  She  may, 
without  thinking  of  emulation,  contemplate  the  im- 

171 


Books  in  General 

posing  effigy  of  a  ram  which  stands  in  the  market 
place  at  Moffat,  or  the  equally  impressive  (and  I 
hope  equestrian)  statue  of  Sir  Henry  Dalziel  which 
will  some  time  grace  the  market-place  of  Kirkcaldy. 
But  she  ought  to  make  a  point,  and  she  has  made 
rather  a  point,  of  overlooking  nobody  of  importance 
who  was  born  in  Edinburgh  or  who  long  resided 
there,  or  did  important  work  there,  or  was  a  bene- 
factor to  the  City.  And  surely  Stevenson  might 
come  in  under  any  of  these  categories. 

He  was  born  in  Edinburgh,  he  went  to  school  in 
Edinburgh,  he  was  an  undergraduate  at  Edinburgh 
University.  And  above  all  he  loved  the  City  and 
everything  within  reach  of  it.  There  is  nothing 
more  convincing  in  his  last  letters  from  Samoa  than 
those  passages,  in  which,  overshadowed  by  death,  he 
told  one  correspondent  that  he  knew  he  would  never 
see  Auld  Reekie  again,  and  asked  another  to  go  down 
to  the  burn  at  Glencorse  and  look  into  the  water  for 
him.  He  had  his  limitations,  and  I  for  one  am  not 
of  the  unqualified  admirers.  But  if  there  is  one 
thing  more  than  another  that  he  did,  and  did  mar- 
vellously, it  was  the  depiction  of  Edinburgh  and  her 
borders,  done  so  vividly  that  a  stranger  who  has 
read  him  knows  them  place  by  place  when  he  sees 
them:  the  wynds  and  closes  off  the  High  Street 
where  such  as  the  Body-Snatchers  lived,  the  discreet 
Georgian  squares  and  crescents  of  the  New  Town 
where  young  Edinburgh  quarrelled  with  its  dour 
father,  the  roads  that  led  through  meadows  and 
172 


The  Missing  Monument 

small  woods  to  the  Pentlands  and  the  desolate  Lam- 
mermuirs,  the  little  pier  by  Quecnsferry,  the  Bass 
Rock.  He  felt  a  profound  affection,  and  he  com- 
municated his  affection.  Edinburgh  was  perhaps 
more  to  him  than  to  Scott  himself,  and  he  certainly 
showed  us  more  of  Edinburgh  as  we  know  it.  All 
this  is  known  to  Scotsmen,  and,  judging  by  the 
bookseller's  counters,  there  is  a  larger  consumption 
of  his  books  in  Edinburgh  than  in  any  other 
town  in  the  world.  Yet  Edinburgh  has  not  put 
up  a  monument  to  him.  There  is  a  tablet  on  a 
church  wall,  there  may  be  a  plaque  on  some  one  of 
the  houses  in  which  he  lived,  and  Swanston  is  beauti- 
fully kept  and  garnished  by  a  devotee.  But  there  Is 
no  statue,  no  Greek  temple,  no  decorated  pile,  no 
Duomo :  at  least  if  there  be  such  as  thing  it  must  be 
too  recent  for  my  guide  book  or  my  local  interlocu- 
tors to  have  heard  of  it  and  either  too  small  and  se- 
cluded to  be  noticed  or  too  huge  to  be  suspected. 
One  always  likes  to  guard  oneself  on  these  occasions, 
and  I  shall  be  only  too  happy  to  find  that  I  have 
made  a  ridiculous  mistake.  Perhaps  that  new 
church  was  the  thing  ...  or  that  sumptuous  cin- 
ema in  the  Babylonian  Renaissance  style.  If  I  am 
wrong  I  withdraw;  but  if  I  am  right  I  am  very  much 
puzzled.  Do  they  want  a  subscription  started  in 
England? 


173 


Verhaeren 

A  STUPID  accident  has  robbed  the  world  of 
Emile  Verhaeren.  Before  the  war  prob- 
ably not  one  Englishman  knew  his  name  for 
every  hundred  who  were  familiar  with  the  works  of 
his  fellow-Belgian  Maeterlinck.  Whether  the  war 
has  greatly  increased  his  reading  public  here  I  do  not 
know;  possibly  not,  for  a  great  deal  of  his  poetry 
is  rather  tough  work  for  the  ordinary  foreigner. 
But  at  least  his  importance  is  now  appreciated.  He 
came  to  England  shortly  after  the  outbreak  of  the 
war,  and  spent  many  months  here.  He  contributed 
to  English  papers  —  I  remember  particularly  an 
article  in  the  Daily  News  and  a  fine  poem  on  aero- 
planes over  Antwerp  in  Poetry  and  Drama  —  and 
he  made  several  public  appearances.  At  a  Labour 
meeting  in  October,  1914,  he  recited  —  or  read  — 
his  heroic  poem,  Cenx  de  Liege,  in  which  steel-cupo- 
las probably  made  their  first  appearance  in  verse.  I 
met  him  once  or  twice.  He  was  a  man  whom,  if  one 
had  that  habit,  one  would  be  tempted  to  describe  as 
an  "old  dear";  absolutely  natural,  gentle,  kindly, 
free  from  the  burden  of  a  reputation,  interested  in 
everything,  willing  to  talk  and  to  listen  without  a 
trace  of  pontifical  authority  or  spurious  concentra- 
tion; if  anything,  a  little  timid.  He  had  a  fine  head: 
greying  hair,  lean,  broad,  bony  face,  with  prominent 
cheekbones  and  aquiline  nose,  and  a  sensitive  mouth 
174 


Verhaeren 

and  chin  half-covered  by  a  flowing,  uncultivated 
moustache.  The  marks  of  suffering  and  thought 
were  on  the  face :  the  forehead  was  wrinkled,  the 
eyebrows  raised,  the  lids  drooped  rather  sadly  over 
the  contemplative  eyes. 

Verhaeren  began  as  a  painter  of  Flemish  scenes, 
with  something  of  seventeenth  century  Flanders 
about  them.  After  a  period  of  hankering  for  the 
safety  of  Catholicism  he  plunged,  in  the  late  'eighties, 
into  an  abyss  of  melancholy  and  pessimism  bordering 
on  madness.  Part  of  this  time  he  spent  in  London, 
which  usually  depresses  sensitive  foreigners.  The 
despair  of  the  three  books  of  this  period  ends  with 
Les  Apparus  dans  mes  Chemins.  His  later  volumes 
are  the  work  of  a  man  who  accepts  and  exults  over 
life,  even  at  its  foulest.  His  pictures,  in  Les  Cam- 
pagnes  Hallucines,  Les  Villes  Tentaciilaires  and  Les 
Villages  Illusoires,  of  the  deterioration  of  the  coun- 
tryside and  the  spread  of  the  urban  fester,  have  their 
gloomy  side,  and,  as  a  Socialist,  he  detested  capitalis- 
tic society;  but  the  poet  in  him  took  a  fierce  pleasure 
in  any  manifestation  of  energy,  however  misdirected. 
Le  Multiple  Splendeur  and  Les  Visages  de  la  Vie 
are  lighter,  more  radiant,  and  some  of  his  love- 
poetry  is  very  simple,  tender  and  happy.  Of  his 
plays  the  best  known  is  Le  Cloitre.  Even  French- 
men sometimes  find  him  obscure  and  knotty.  But 
his  difficult  passages  are  never  deliberately  so;  they 
are  the  strong  writhings  of  a  Laocoon  in  the  toils  of 
the  serpents  of  Spirit  and  Matter. 

175 


Books  in  General 

A  certain  amount  has  been  written  about  him  in 
EngHsh.  There  exists  a  volume  of  poetical  transla- 
tions from  him  by  Miss  Alma  Strettell,  and  Messrs. 
Constable  have  recently  published  an  interesting 
prose  translation  of  his  "  Love  Poems  "  by  Mr.  F.  S. 
Flint.  Constable  also  published,  some  years  ago, 
what  is  probably  the  best  monograph  yet  written  on 
him:  that  by  Stefan  Zweig,  a  young  Viennese  poet 
and  critic.  It  is  rather  a  lopsided  book:  exuberant, 
precipitous,  festooned  with  a  tropical  profusion  of 
metaphors.  The  author  is  an  idolator,  and,  like  all 
idolators,  rather  anthropomorphic.  But  he  is  often 
right,  always  interesting  and  sometimes  illuminating. 
Herr  Zweig  is  not  a  Frenchman  or  a  Belgian.  His 
principal  error  of  omission  is  his  failure  to  consider 
Verhaeren's  poetry  as  French  verse.  His  main  error 
of  the  other  sort  was  made  when  he  claimed  the  poet 
as  a  pillar  of  German  culture:  a  view  perhaps  that 
he  may,  by  now,  have  modified. 


176 


A  Shakespeare  MS.? 

SIR  EDWARD  MAUNDE  THOMPSON  be- 
lieves  that  in  the  British  Museum  there  is  a 
holograph  MS.  in  Shakespeare's  handwriting. 
The  arguments  in  favour  of  this  are  to  be  found  in  a 
volume  {Shakespeare's  Handwriting)  recently  issued 
by  the  Oxford  University  Press.  The  general  ques- 
tion of  Shakespeare's  fist  was  dealt  with  by  Sir  Ed- 
ward in  a  contribution  to  Shakespeare's  England:  I 
remember  that  he  argued,  not  altogether  to  my  sat- 
isfaction, that  the  Bard,  in  spite  of  appearances, 
really  wrote  a  bold  and  fluent  —  I  forget  if  he  said 
elegant  —  hand.  The  present  volume  is  an  expan- 
sion of  that  study;  and  is  "  strictly  paleographical, 
.  .  .  altogether  eschewing  criticism  of  a  literary  na- 
ture." 

"  '  My  researches,'  says  Sir  Edward,  '  in  due 
course  led  to  an  examination  of  the  well-known  addi- 
tion, written  in  an  unidentified  hand,  to  the  MS.  play 
of  Sir  Thomas  More,  now  the  Harleian  MS.  7368  in 
the  British  Museum.  Nearly  half-a-century  has 
passed  since,  in,  1871,  this  addition  was  brought  to 
public  notice  in  a  contribution  to  Notes  and  Queries 
by  the  Shakespearean  student,  Richard  Simpson,  who 
suggested  it  was  an  autograph  composition  of 
Shakespeare.     This  attribution  could  not  be  substan- 

177 


Books  in  General 

tiated  at  the  time;  the  key  of  the  problem  was  still 
undiscovered.  When  I  lately  renewed  acquaint- 
ance with  the  Harleian  MS.  it  was  with  a  lively  inter- 
est that  I  recognized  in  the  handwriting  of  the  addi- 
tion certain  features  which  I  had  already  noted  in 
Shakespeare's  signatures.  A  careful  study  of  the 
MS,  ensued,  and  in  this  monograph  I  have  set  out  my 
reasons  for  concluding  that  at  length  we  have  found 
what  so  many  generations  have  vainly  desired  to  be- 
hold —  a  holograph  MS.  of  our  great  Enghsh 
poet.'  " 

The  MS.  in  question  is  portion  of  a  play  most  of 
which  is  by  Anthony  Munday.  Of  20  sheets,  13  are 
in  the  author's  handwriting.  There  are  several  edi- 
tions of  the  play,  of  which  the  latest  is  Dr.  Greg's 
(191 1 ),  and  the  MS.  was  reproduced  in  collotype 
in  the  Tudor  Facsimile  Texts  in  19 10,  by  Mr.  J.  S. 
Farmer. 

Three  of  the  pages  attributed  to  Shakespeare  are 
reproduced  by  the  present  author.  Into  his  long 
and  elaborate  comparison  of  the  script  with  Shakes- 
peare's signatures  one  cannot  enter  here,  but  it  is  ex- 
tremely convincing  in  its  cumulative  effect.  And 
there  is  certainly  a  good  deal  in  the  text  which  any- 
body might  wager  to  be  Shakespeare  if  he  came 
across  it  unawares.  More  is  quelling  a  riot  of  ap- 
prentices who  are  demanding  the  expulsion  of  aliens, 
and  addresses  them  thus  (I  modernize  the  lan- 
guage) : 
178 


A  Shakespeare  MS.? 

Grant  them  removed,  and  grant  that  this  your  noise 
Hath  chid  down  all  the  majesty  of  England. 
Imagine  that  you  see  the  wretched  strangers, 
Their  babies  at  their  backs,  and  their  poor  luggage, 
Plodding  to  the  ports  and  coasts  for  transportation, 
And  that  you  sit  as  kings  in  your  desires, 
Authority  quite  silenced  by  your  brawl. 
And  you,  in  ruff  of  your  opinions  clothed, 
JVhat  had  you  got?     I'll  tell  you,  you  had  taught 
Hozv  insolence  and  strong  hand  should  prevail, 
How  ordered  should  be  quelled,  and  by  this  pattern 
Not  one  of  you  should  live  an  aged  man, 
For  other  ruffians  as  their  fancies  wrought 
JFith  self-same  hand,  self-reasons,  and  self-right, 
Would  shark  on  you,  and  men  like  ravenous  fishes 
JFould  feed  on  one  another. 

This  is  undeniably  Shakespearean  in  temper,  argu- 
ment, language  and  prosody.  I  observe,  by  the  way, 
that  Shakespeare's  lazy  habit  of  putting,  for  a  signa- 
ture, a  few  letters  and  then  a  shorthand  squiggle  is 
paralleled  here.  He  calls  More  (Moor),  in  one 
place,  "  Moo  "  —  feeling  that  that  is  quite  sufficient 
to  make  his  meaning  clear. 


179 


A  Seaside  Library 

N' 


''^^  "'^O,"  I  thought,  "  I  won't  take  any  books 
with  me.  I  want  a  rest.  I  shall  swim. 
I  shall  catch  fish.  There  is  sure  to  be  a 
biUiard-room  in  that  pub.,  and  pretty  certain  to  be  a 
few  people  who  play  bridge.  The  overtaxed  brain 
must  be  allowed  relaxation.  So  good-bye,  Plato; 
good-bye,  Spinoza;  good-bye,  Samuel  Rawson  Gardi- 
ner; good-bye,  Freud.  I  won't  take  any  of  you." 
I  had  been  in  the  place  twenty-four  hours,  and  had 
plumbed  the  depths  of  my  neighbours'  incapacity  to 
play  any  games  of  skill  or  chance  (except  possibly  — 
I  did  not  ask  this  —  loo  and  vingt-et-un) ,  when,  saun- 
tering down  the  main,  and  indeed  the  only,  street, 
I  caught  sight  of  the  words,  "  Grocer,  Chemist,  To- 
bacconist, Draper,  and  Circulating  Library."  It 
would  be  ungracious,  I  felt,  to  let  such  versatility  go 
unrecognized.  Besides,  one  might  as  well  take  a 
novel  or  two  out  with  one  in  the  boat.  It  might 
make  the  intervals  between  the  bites  seem  a  little 
shorter.     So  in  I  went. 

A  young  girl  with  a  pigtail  escorted  me  past  the 
Quaker  Oats  and  the  Gold  Flakes,  under  a  little 
doorway  and  into  a  back  room.  "  A  shilling  de- 
posit, and  twopence  on  each  book,"  she  said;  and 
i8o 


A  Seaside  Library 

left  me  to  the  shelves.  There  were  books  there  all 
right:  about  two  thousand  of  them,  reaching  from 
floor  to  ceihng  on  both  sides.  There  was  no  sort  of 
order,  alphabetical  or  otherwise,  so  it  was  no  good 
expecting  to  find  a  particular  author  right  off.  The 
only  thing  for  it  was  beginning  somewhere  and  go- 
ing steadily  along  the  rows. 

B.  M.  Croker:  yes,  I  think  I  read  a  great  many  of 
hers  in  my  youth.  They  were  about  penniless  young 
ladies  going  to  India  and  getting  married.  It  is  no 
good  tackling  this  one.  The  Gateless  Barrier,  by 
Lucas  Malet:  that  was  about  spiritualism,  and  pretty 
thorough  rubbish  it  was;  I  shall  probably  come  to  Sir 
Richard  Calmady  presently,  but  I  shall  give  him  a 
miss  too.  The  Iron  Pirate:  I  liked  that  rather,  but 
it  would  be  a  pity  not  to  like  it  so  much  now.  I  feel 
the  same  about  Saracinesca,  The  JVitch  of  Prague, 
and  In  the  Palace  of  the  King,  which  are  all  in  a  lump 
together  where  some  late  devotee  has  replaced  them. 
Marion  Crawford,  upon  whose  every  word  my  child- 
hood hung,  I  dare  not  attempt  you  again;  even  A 
Cigarette  Maker's  Romance  and  the  chronicle  of 
Mr.  Isaacs  (who  enjoyed  Kant  and  deluded  me,  for 
a  time,  into  the  belief  that  I  should  like  him  too) 
will  be  more  dear  to  the  memory  if  they  are  not  re- 
stored to  sight.  Count  Hannibal:  that  was  the  man 
who  either  massacred  somebody  or  escaped  massacre 
on  St.  Bartholomew's  Day.  He  had  a  great  square 
jaw  and  eyes  that  made  you  jump;  and  women  cow- 
ered and  obeyed  when  he  emitted  a  short,  sharp  oath 

i8i 


Books  in  General 

or  looked  like  emitting  one.  William  Black  I  never 
liked  at  any  time,  so  nothing  by  him  need  detain  me. 
Flames?  No.  Dodof  Oh  dear,  no.  Ships  That 
Pass  in  the  Night?  No.  There  was  edelweiss  in  it, 
and  an  old  man  who,  like  Lord  Randolph  Churchill, 
read  nothing  but  Gibbon.  Queen  Victoria  thought 
highly  of  it,  but  I  don't  want  to  read  it  again.  Nor 
Red  Pottage  either.  The  husband  and  the  other 
man  (I  think)  had  a  duel.  They  drew  straws,  and 
the  man  with  the  shortest  straw  had  to  kill  himself. 
What  the  lady  thought  about  it  I  don't  remember. 
But  one  of  them  was  a  Lord,  New  Zealand  came  in 
somewhere,  and  at  suitable  places  in  the  conversation 
a  moth  would  flutter  or  a  kingfisher  flash  by.  It  is 
by  touches  like  these  that  one  can  distinguish  really 
imaginative  literature,  but  I  am  not  tempted. 

It  is  not  reasonable  to  expect  a  man  at  this  date  to 
return  to  A  Yellow  Aster,  or  Moths  by  Ouida.  As 
for  The  Silence  of  Dean  Maitland,  the  predicament 
of  that  respected  ecclesiastic  with  the  undisclosed  sin 
on  his  conscience  is  still  fresh  in  my  mind,  and  I  still 
remember  how  my  elders,  when  it  first  came  out,  de- 
bated whether  such  a  book  ought  to  be  written,  and 
whether  Maxwell  Gray  was  a  man  or  a  woman.  Of 
The  Sorrows  of  Satan^  I  recall  Httle  of  the  plot,  ex- 
cept that  the  Devil  was  a  gentleman.  I  think  that 
the  first  sentences  were:  "  Do  you  know  what  it  is 
to  be  poor?  Not  with  that  —  poverty  that  —  on 
ten  thousand  a  year,  but  with  that  grinding  poverty 
that,"  etc.  How  many  years  ago  is  it  that  that  im- 
182 


A  Seaside  Library 

mortal  paragraph,  reproduced  in  facsimile  from  the 
author's  own  script,  appeared  in  the  Strand  Maga- 
zine, with  pictures  of  the  great  novehst  in  various 
postures?  It  would  be  Ethel  M.  Dell  now,  I  sup- 
pose; but  they  don't  seem  to  keep  Miss  Dell's  works 
in  this  Circulating  Library,  of  which  the  circulation 
appears  to  have  stopped  many,  many  years  since. 
They  keep  instead  Frankfort  Moore  and  G.  B.  Bur- 
gin. 

Anthony  Hope  now.  Here  is  The  Intrusions  of 
Peggy.  There  was  a  grizzled  inventor  who  lived  in 
the  Temple,  and  he  had  a  daughter  who  shone  like  a 
sunbeam  amidst  the  dusty  shades  of  the  law.  An- 
thony Hope,  who  was  very  nearly  a  first-rate  writer, 
must  have  put  it  better  than  that;  but  Tm  sure  that  is 
what  it  was  about.  Seton  Merriman  now.  This  is 
better.  But  will  or  will  not  a  reperusal  of  The  Vul- 
tures and  Roden's  Corner  diminish  the  respect  that 
still  survives  in  me  for  him?  He  gave  me  immense 
pleasure  at  the  time;  can  I  risk  it?     I  don't  know. 

With  meditations  like  the  above  I  roamed  up  and 
down  before  the  frayed  and  wrinkled  backs  of  these 
veterans,  fascinated  by  so  systematic  a  recovery  of 
the  familiar.  Then  I  remember  that  the  sun  was 
shining  in  a  blue  sky,  only  slightly  fleeced  with  cloud; 
that  the  salt  wind  blowing  shoreward  was  driving 
broken  sunlight  over  the  waves;  that  there  was  as 
good  fish  in  the  sea  as  ever  came  out  of  it;  and  that 
I  must  really  take  care  of  my  health.      Catching  sight 

183 


Books  in  General 

of  She  and  Many  Cargoes,  which  I  have  read  at 
least  ten  times  apiece,  but  am  always  good  for  again, 
I  detached  them  from  their  faded  companions  and 
took  them  into  the  front  shop,  meditating  upon  the 
astonishing  sluggishness  of  this  store,  where  even 
Mrs.  Barclay  had  not  yet  penetrated  and  Garvice 
was  a  cloudy  speculation  in  the  far  future. 

I  paid  my  one-and-fourpence  and  stepped  out  on  to 
the  cobble-stones.  As  I  passed  into  the  sun,  it  oc- 
curred to  me  that  it  was  not  surprising  that  even  the 
minor  works  in  this  library  were  like  old  friends. 
For  —  and  things  like  these  do  strangely  remain 
known,  yet  for  a  time,  unrelated  —  I  spent  a  sum- 
mer in  this  village  fifteen  years  ago. 


184 


A  Voice  from  the  Past 

SUMMER  having  set  in  with  its  usual  severity, 
I  sat  down  with  Mr,  John  F.  Tattersall's  edi- 
tion of  Charles  Macfarlane's  Reminiscences  of 
a  Literary  Life  (Murray) .  It  has  something  of  the 
interest  of  Pompeii  and  Mycenas.  It  was  written 
sixty  years  ago  by  a  man  who  had  been  a  fairly  well- 
known  author  and  traveller  with  a  wide  acquaintance 
and  ended  his  days  as  a  Brother  of  the  Charterhouse. 
When  his  active  career  was  over  he  dictated  his  mem- 
ories of  the  eminent  and  peculiar  people  he  had  met. 
What  became  of  the  MS.  when  he  died  we  do  not 
know;  for  all  practical  purposes  it  was  lost  until 
19 16.  A  provincial  bookseller  bought  it  with  a  lot 
of  ledgers  at  a  country  sale  —  thus  saving  it  from 
probable  destruction  —  and  the  present  editor  was 
struck  by  its  description  in  the  bookseller's  catalogue 
as  a  manuscript  mentioning  the  names  of  Shelley  and 
Keats.  The  result  is  that  we  have  here  a  volume  of 
new  stories  about  many  of  the  celebrities  of  the 
Regency  and  succeeding  periods. 

This  Macfarlane  was  a  Tory  and  a  stout  Church- 
man. He  disliked  extreme  opinions,  cranks  and  sol- 
emn persons;  but  if  a  man  appeared  to  be  a  decent 
soul  opinions  were  not  much  of  a  barrier.  He  was 
not  at  all  a  theorizer:  though  he  would  talk  politics 

185 


Books  in  General 

and  literature  over  his  port,  he  was  not  the  sort  of 
man  who  would  be  living  in  a  rarefied  atmosphere 
of  speculation  most  of  his  time.  The  result  is  that 
it  was  the  normal  rather  than  the  abnormal  aspects 
of  men  that  he  most  noticed  and  that,  indeed,  would 
naturally  be  most  often  presented  to  him.  He  rec- 
ognized genius;  but  most  of  his  stories  about  genius 
are  of  the  kind  which  remind  us  that  even  the  most 
highly-endowed  of  our  ancesters  occasionally  be- 
haved like  people  in  'buses :  that  Shelley,  for  instance, 
was  not  uninterruptedly  posing  for  his  portrait  with 
his  shirt  open  at  the  neck. 

One  can  scarcely  say  that  the  new  anecdotes  of 
Shelley  and  Keats,  thus  unexpectedly  recovered,  are 
highly  important;  though  they  may  quite  possibly 
make  a  brace  of  professors  feel  that  such  "  new  ma- 
terial "  justifies  new  biographies.  There  is  a  touching 
account  of  an  afternoon  on  the  seashore  with  Shelley, 
who  sat  despondently  looking  out  over  the  waves, 
"  with  the  glowing  sunset  shining  full  on  his  pale, 
haggard  face."  The  excursion  was  terminated  by  a 
visit  to  a  macaroni  factory,  where  Shelley  showed  (I 
suppose  one  might)  "  all  the  hilarity  and  fun  of  a 
schoolboy."  Mary  Shelley  Macfarlane  found  "  a 
very  delicate,  elegant,  charming  person;  and  there 
seemed  to  be  great  affection  and  an  entire  confidence 
between  them."  Shelley  at  this  stage  was,  we  are 
informed,  "  a  practical  and  daily  practising  Chris- 
tian "  and  "  an  assiduous  reader  of  the  New  Testa- 
ment " ;  the  one  thing  needful  was  the  alteration  of 
i86 


A  Voice  from  the  Past 

a  few  words  in  his  vocabulary.  It  is  surprising  but 
refreshing  to  find  a  man  describing  Keats  as  "  one  of 
the  most  cheery  and  plucky  little  fellows  I  ever 
knew."  "  I  firmly  believe,"  he  says,  "  that  by  the 
side  of  any  friend  Keats  would  have  faced  a  battery, 
and  would  have  stood  under  a  shower  of  cannon- 
balls,  chain-shot,  canister  or  grape  "  —  which  is  suf- 
ficiently specific.  Keats,  like  Shelley,  appears  to 
have  owed  some  happy  moments  to  macaroni : 

"  He  had  intense  enjoyment  in  halting  close  to  the 
Capuan  Gate,  and  in  watching  a  group  of  lazzaroni 
or  labouring  men  as,  at  a  stall  with  fire  and  cauldron 
by  the  roadside  in  the  open  air,  they  were  disposing 
of  an  incredible  quantity  of  macaroni,  introducing  it 
in  long,  unbroken  strings  into  their  capacious  mouths, 
without  the  intermediary  of  anything  but  their  hands. 
'  I  like  this,'  said  he;  '  these  hearty  fellows  scorn  the 
humbug  of  knives  and  forks.  Fingers  were  in- 
vented first.  Give  them  some  carlini  that  they  may 
eat  more !  Glorious  sight !  How  they  take  it 
inl'" 

Macfarlane's  description  of  Godwin  is  as  familiar 
and  cheerful  as  his  references  to  the  plucky  little  fel- 
low: 

"  Old  Godwin  greatly  preferred  a  quiet  game  of 
whist  in  a  cosy  corner  to  conversation.  In  his  man- 
ner he  was  a  quiet,  retiring,  unpretentious  old  gentle- 
man." 

187 


Books  in  General 

He  is  alleged  to  have  thrown  over  his  early  princi- 
ples bodily.  It  is  at  any  rate  a  relief  to  know  that 
he  played  cards. 

Once,  when  he  alludes  casually  and  without  fur- 
ther explanation  to  "  Miss  Crump,  the  authoress,"  I 
feel  a  grievance  against  Macfarlane :  those  four 
words  make  me  hunger  for  more.  But  as  a  rule  he 
does  not  drag  anybody's  name  in  unless  he  has  some- 
thing to  say  about  him.  Some  of  his  stories  are 
amusing.  Rogers,  the  poet,  a  notoriously  slow 
writer,  headed  a  long  poem  Lines  Written  at  Pas- 
tum:  Sydney  Smith,  discovering  that  Rogers  was 
only  at  Passtum  for  a  few  hours,  said  that  this  title 
must  be  mendacious,  "  for  we  all  know  that  when 
he  is  delivered  of  a  single  couplet,  straw  is  spread 
in  St.  James's  Place,  and  his  friends  call  with 
anxious  inquiries,  and  are  told  that  he  is  as  well  as 
can  be  expected  after  his  labour."  Macfarlane 
liked  Leigh  Hunt  in  spite  of  his  dislike  of  Hunt's 
financial  incompetence.  Hunt  described  Landor, 
who  owed  £20,000,  as  "  a  very  lucky  fellow  to 
have  been  able  to  get  so  much  credit,"  and  there 
is  a  delightful  story  of  a  fiver  which  the  Carlyles  were 
always  lending  Mrs.  Hunt  and  which  was  at  last  kept 
in  a  separate  case  labelled  "  Hunt  money."  He  re- 
spected Coleridge,  found  Wordsworth  unexpectedly 
human  and  friendly,  and  had  an  immense  affection 
for  Tom  Moore;  but  De  Quincey  he  could  not  stand. 
His  diatribes  against  that  writer  are  not  very  inter- 
esting, but  it  is  amusing  to  learn  that  (he  never  had 
188 


A  Voice  from  the  Past 

any  money)  "  whenever  he  had  engaged  to  write  a 
magazine  article  or  to  do  any  other  work  for  the 
booksellers,  those  gentlemen  were  almost  certain  to 
receive  from  him,  in  a  day  or  two,  a  note  stating  that 
he  was  out  of  laudanum."  This  homely  detail  does 
not,  I  think,  come  into  the  Confessions  of  an  Opium- 
Eater. 

Macfarlane's  descriptions  are  always  sprightly. 
Their  one  defect  is  that,  as  a  rule,  they  are  too 
slight  and  short.  One  of  the  few  exceptions  is  a  long 
passage  on  Hartley  Coleridge,  the  best  —  and  the 
tenderest  —  chapter  in  the  book.  The  picture  is  the 
usual  one:  the  small,  fragile  man,  gentle  as  a  child, 
chivalrous,  vivacious,  a  fine  and  learned  talker,  uni- 
versally beloved;  but  continually  drunk.  When 
Macfarlane  first  went  in  search  of  him  he  was  in  a 
village  inn,  a  small,  seedy  gentleman  surrounded  by 
gigantic  waggoners  and  farmers.  "  The  bibulous 
little  sprite  "  went  off  to  order  a  magnum  of  port  for 
dinner  and  see  the  chill  taken  off  it,  and  a  farmer  at 
once  confided  in  the  visitor  his  opinion  of  the  "  won- 
derful gentleman  "  who  lived  in  a  cottage  and  knew 
everybody  for  miles  around : 

"  Some  do  say  that  he  has  more  book-learning 
than  Mr,  Wordsworth  or  Professor  Wilson,  and 
that  he  can  beat  them  hollow  at  verse-making.  We 
all  love  him,  sir,  for  he  is  so  good  and  kind,  and  so 
fond  of  our  children.  We  would  do  anything  for 
our  poet,  that  we  would!      But  it's  a  great  pity  that 

189 


Books  in  General 

he  is  not  more  steady  and  more  regular  at  his  meals, 
for  tippling,  though  only  with  this  small  ale,  is  bad 
on  an  empty  stomach,  and  when  he  gets  queer  in  the 
head  he  doesn't  always  know  what  he  is  about; 
more's  the  pity,  for  he's  a  gentleman,  every  inch  of 
him,  and  would  not  hurt  a  worm." 

Dipsomania,  as  a  fellow-journalist  said  about  the 
war,  "  has  no  doubt  its  seamy  side."  But  a  man  of 
letters  who  got  such  an  epitaph  from  such  a  source 
cannot  be  said  to  have  been  a  complete  failure  in  life. 
I  had  rather  have  been  he  than,  say,  Jeremy  Ben- 
tham. 


190 


Francis  Thompson's  Method 

A  RECENT  number  of  The  Dublin  Review 
contains  a  very  interesting  article  on  Francis 
Thompson's  Note-Books,  several  fragmen- 
tary unpublished  poems  by  Thompson  being  given. 
Thompson's  note-books  were  almost  his  only  prop- 
erty. 

"  They  were  a  preoccupation,  things  to  be  remem- 
bered when  he  collected  his  hat  and  coat,  or  to  be 
most  anxiously  retrieved  when  forgotten  or  mislaid. 
They  were  his  other  self;  his  companions  through 
many  solitary  years;  his  life-work  and  his  library; 
they  were  the  only  things  he  never  discarded.  The 
few  volumes  that  came  his  way  as  a  reviewer,  when 
they  overflowed  more  than  a  small  shelf,  would  be 
sold,  and  if  he  changed  his  lodging  nothing  of  ac- 
count had  to  be  removed  save  the  many  dozens  of 
shabby  exercise-books  that  filled  a  large  tin  box  — 
dense  piles  of  unstitched  leaves  covered  with  faded 
pencil-marks." 

In  these  books  —  penny  books  lettered  in  "  Station- 
ers' Gothic  "  —  he  used  to  keep  masses  of  quotations 
from  authors  of  all  ages  —  religious  and  profane  — 
as  well  as  the  drafts  of  his  poems. 

191 


Books  in  General 

Few  poetical  MSS.  of  modern  times  can  have  pre- 
sented such  difficulties  to  their  editors  as  these. 
Masses  of  Thompson's  sketches  for  poems  still,  I  be- 
lieve, remain  undeciphered;  or  rather,  unarranged. 
His  ideas  about  order  were  peculiar.  He  would 
begin  one  poem  at  the  beginning  of  a  book  and  an- 
other at  the  end;  the  two  would  cross  in  the  middle. 
He  would  cover  a  page  with  alternative  suggestions 
for  stanzas,  lines  and  words  —  often  mixed  up  with 
quite  different  stanzas  or  pieces  of  stanzas  —  strewn 
about  in  the  most  extraordinary  order.  He  did  not 
delete  on  the  paper;  deletion  had  gone  on  in  his  mind 
before  he  wrote.  But  he  would  put  down  in  a  little 
column  half-a-dozen  feasible  variants  of  a  word  or  a 
line  and  leave  them  there  to  be  chosen  from. 
"  Sometimes,"  says  the  writer  of  the  article,  "  where 
he  found  the  pencillings  of  an  old  volume  conven- 
iently faded,  he  has  turned  it  over  and  filled  it  again 
with  new  matter."  Specimen  stanzas  of  his  well- 
known  and  beautiful  cricket  song  are  given,  which 
show  his  method  of  working.  But  nobody  could 
really  get  an  idea  of  it  who  had  not  inspected  these 
incredible  little  exercise-books.  I  contracted  a  head- 
ache from  one  of  them  myself  not  long  ago  when  I 
spent  an  afternoon  trying  to  put  one  of  the  jig-saws 
together.  In  the  end  it  was  clear  that  it  was  a  poem, 
of,  say,  20  stanzas,  appearing  in  some  such  order  as 
I,  2,  6,  4,  15,  variant  of  2,  3,  19,  20,  variant  of  15, 
14,  13,  a  disconnected  verse  which  obviously  wouldn't 
have  gone  in,  5,  7,  8,  16;  verses  17  and  18  being  miss- 
ing, and  notions  for  single  lines  being  liberally 
192 


Francis  Thompson's  Method 

sprinkled  about,  sometimes  at  great  distances  from 
their  natural  homes.  The  scholars  of  the  future  will 
find  these  manuscripts  a  great  quarry  for  emenda- 
tions, theories  of  poetic  craftsmanship,  &c. 


193 


Tobacco 

THE  Western  World  waited  a  long  time  for 
tobacco.  Pithecanthropus  erectus,  the  first 
proprietor  of  the  Piltdown  skull,  Buddha, 
the  Pharaohs,  Aristophanes,  Caractacus,  Rabelais, 
and  Henry  VIII.  all  did  without  it.  Assyria  never 
knew  a  hookah,  and  Rome  Declined  and  Fell  without 
suspecting  that  its  historian  would  take  snuff. 
Through  one  knows  not  how  many  ages  the  lean,  red, 
unimagined  men  of  America  sat  in  circles  on  their 
haunches,  with  travelling-rugs  around  their  shoul- 
ders, and  sent  up  grey  swirls  of  smoke  to  fade  in  the 
air,  whilst  our  own  fathers  lived  and  died  without 
discovering  what  to  do  with  their  hands  and  mouths. 
The  swift  and  tremendous  triumph  of  tobacco  is  not 
easy  to  express  in  a  phrase.  Statistics  do  not  convey 
it.  To  realize  it  one  should  be  in  a  crowd.  Go  to  a 
great  football  match  in  mid-winter  and  look  across 
the  field  at  the  grand  stand.  In  full  daylight  a  mist 
of  smoke  rises  from  it;  as  darkness  begins  to  come 
over,  it  is  dotted,  first  palely,  then  brightly,  with  little 
flames  that  leap  and  suddenly  die.  Sometimes 
twenty  will  be  burning  together  for  an  instant,  some- 
times two;  but  always  the  torch  is  carried  on.  Mul- 
tiply to  the  dimensions  of  the  world,  and  one  can 
catch  a  picture  of  the  whole  globe  sprinkled  uninter- 
194 


Tobacco 

mittently  with  these  little  spurting  fires:  what  more 
suitable  name  than  Vestas?  When  Jean  Nicot,  Sir 
Ralph  Lane,  and  Sir  Walter  Raleigh  brought  their 
dried  leaves  across  the  water,  they  had  no  thought  of 
this. 

Queen  Elizabeth,  as  every  traveller  knows,  spent 
the  whole  of  her  long  reign  in  a  feverish  effort  to 
sleep  in  the  maximum  number  of  four-poster  beds. 
Charles  II.,  after  the  Battle  of  Worcester,  dedicated 
himself  to  a  similar  endeavour;  whilst  Cromwell  had 
an  arduous  time  of  it  stabling  his  horses  in  even  the 
most  secluded  and  inaccessible  churches  in  order  to 
provide  every  parish  with  its  legend.  Sir  Walter 
Raleigh  was  another  of  these  solicitous  persons. 
When  he  smoked  the  pioneer  pipe  in  his  garden  and 
his  vigilant  valet  threw  a  jug  of  beer  over  him  to  put 
him  out,  the  turn  was,  apparently  so  successful  that  it 
was  repeated  in  all  parts  of  the  country,  and  even  in 
Ireland.  This,  however,  is  an  iconoclastic  age,  and 
Mr.  Apperson*  throws  cold  water  on  Sir  Walter  and 
on  the  story.  But,  whoever  introduced  what  one 
may  refrain  from  calling  The  Weed  or  Our  Lady 
Nicotine,  tobacco  on  fire  was  soon  going  like  a  house 
on  fire.  There  is  no  reason  to  suppose  that  Shakes- 
peare (who  never  mentions  tobacco)  smoked  any 
more  than  there  is  to  suppose  that  he  did  anything 
else;  and  Queen  Elizabeth  found  her  first  and  per- 
haps only  experience  of  a  pipe  upsetting.      But  Bur- 

*A  Social  History  of  Smoking.     By  G.  L.  Apperson.     Seeker. 


Books  in  General 

leigh  smoked,  Spenser  wrote  of  "  divine  Tabacco," 
Lilly  described  it  as  a  "  holy  herb,"  smoking  was 
soon  general  even  in  theatres,  and  within  a  genera- 
tion of  tobacco's  introduction  a  satirist  could  say  that 
among  the  quahfications  for  a  gallant  were  "  to  take 
Tobacco  well  "  and  "  to  spit  well."  Naturally,  so 
great  and  sudden  a  change  of  habits  meant  polemics 
in  opposition.  Burton  of  the  Anatomy  described 
tobacco  as 

"  a  plague,  a  mischief,  a  violent  purger  of  goods, 
lands,  health,  hellish,  devilish,  and  damned  tobacco, 
the  ruin  and  overthrow  of  body  and  soul." 

Dekker  called  it  a  "  beggarly  Monarche  of  Indians, 
and  setter-up  of  rotton  lung'd  chimney-sweepers"; 
and  Sylvester  wrote  a  poem  entitled  Tobacco  Bat- 
tered and  the  Pipes  Shattered  {about  their  Ears  that 
idlely  Idolize  so  base  and  barbarous  a  JVeed,  or  at 
Leastwise  Over-Love  so  loathsome  Vanitie)  by  A 
Volley  of  Holy  Shot  Thundered  From  Mount  Heli- 
con, in  which  he  suggested  that  it  was  only  to  be  ex- 
pected that  "  Tobacconists  "  should  be  drunkards 
and  adulterers.  (Mr.  Apperson,  by  the  way,  does 
not  appear  to  have  noticed  that  Sylvester  anticipated 
Porson's  celebrated  joke  —  which  he  quotes  —  about 
roj  /3a/cxw.)  It  was  thcsc  wild  men  that  Ben  Jon- 
son  was  ridiculing  when  he  made  a  character  in 
one  of  his  plays  swear  that  four  people  had  died  of 
smoking  in  one  house  in  one  week,  and  that  one  of 
them  had  "  voided  a  bushel  of  soot."  But  the  cap- 
196 


Tobacco 

tain  of  them  was  Ben's  monarch,  James  L,  whose 
Counterblaste  to  Tobacco  is  a  very  hearty  piece  of 
invective.  He  asked  why  we  should  be  "  mooved 
to  imitate  the  barbarous  and  beastly  manners  of  the 
wilde,  godless  and  slavish  Indians,  especially  in  so 
vile  and  stinking  a  custome?"  Non-smokers  were 
annoyed  by  smokers  who  at  meals  made  "  the  filthy 
smoke  and  stinke  thereof  to  exhale  athwart  the 
dishes  and  infect  the  aire  ";  and  wives  either  had  to 
corrupt  their  own  sweet  breath  with  tobacco  "  or  else 
resolve  to  live  in  a  perpetuall  stinking  torment." 
James'  last  sentence  was  certainly  the  most  eloquent 
peroration  —  it  is  not  saying  a  great  deal  —  ever 
perpetrated  by  an  English  king: 

"  A  custome  lothsome  to  the  eye,  hateful  to  the 
Nose,  harmefuU  to  the  braine,  dangerous  to  the 
Lungs,  and  in  the  blacke  stinking  fume  thereof, 
neerest  resembling  the  horrible  Stigian  smoke  of  the 
pit  that  is  bottomlesse." 

The  struggle  went  on.  In  162 1,  during  a  Com- 
mons debate,  two  knights  urged  total  Prohibition, 
one  of  them  saying  that  tobacco  was  now  "  so  com- 
mon that  he  hath  seen  ploughmen  take  it  as  they  are 
at  plough."  Prohibition  was  not,  however,  adopted ; 
the  nearest  approach  to  it  under  the  British  Flag  was 
a  Puritan  Colonial  law  of  Connecticut  restricting 
the  use  of  tobacco  to  bona-fide  travellers.  A  man 
could  have  one  pipe  if  he  went  ten  miles,  but  never 
two  pipes  in  a  day.     In  England  itself,  by   1650, 

197 


Books  in  General 

smoking  seems  to  have  been  permitted  even  in  the 
House  of  Commons  itself. 

The  unfashionable  classes  never  dropped  it  again; 
draymen,  ploughmen,  minor  officials,  country  clergy- 
men and  landlords,  eccentric  dons  and  authors,  stuck 
to  their  clay  pipes  through  all  the  changes  of  upper- 
class  custom.  The  turn  of  the  tide  amongst  the 
polite  began  soon  after  the  Restoration.  A  snuffbox 
was  more  manageable  than  a  clay  pipe,  which  you 
could  not  carry  about  with  you  very  easily  and  which 
in  any  case  might  soil  your  clothes;  and,  in  an  age 
when  women  were  at  once  fastidious  and  influential, 
regard  for  their  wishes  must  have  had  something  to 
do  with  it,  I  have  never  tried  eighteenth-century 
tobacco  but  it  is  likely  that  tobacco  was  in  bad  odour 
because  there  was  bad  odour  in  tobacco.  In  garrets, 
cellars,  taverns,  and  country  rectories  the  "  clouds  of 
incense  "  still  rose.  The  seventeenth-century  Buck- 
inghamshire parson  who,  running  short  of  tobacco, 
cut  up  his  bell-ropes  and  smoked  them  would  have 
found  congenial  company  among  such  successors  as 
Dr.  Farmer,  Master  of  Emmanuel  and  author  of  the 
fine  Essay  on  Shakespeare's  Learning,  who  always 
spent  the  day  smoking  with  the  farmers  when  he  vis- 
ited his  country  church  to  do  duty,  and  used  to  greet 
them  weekly  with:  "  I  am  going  to  read  prayers, 
but  shall  be  back  by  the  time  you  have  made  the 
punch."  The  proletariat  had  its  pipe  and  clung  to  it 
with  frenzy;  when  a  Bill  imposing  an  excise  on 
tobacco  was  thrown  out,  all  the  church  bells  in  Derby 
198 


Tobacco 

were  rung;  they  did  not  realize,  apparently,  that  the 
best  way  of  guaranteeing  the  future  of  your  vices  is 
to  give  the  State  a  vested  interest  in  them.  But 
plum-coloured  coats  and  fine  ruffles  were  not  defiled 
by  the  plebeian  habit.  Snuff  was  paramount  in  Soci- 
ety, from  the  Throne  downwards:  Queen  Char- 
lotte was  always  referred  to  by  her  sons  as  "  Old 
Snuffy."  As  late  as  the  'forties  Wellington  issued 
a  very  ungrammatical  injunction  to  commanding  of- 
ficers to  stop  their  juniors  from  smoking;  that  an 
undergraduate  of  Trinity  was  sent  down  for  smok- 
ing a  cigar  during  service  in  the  College  chapel  is 
perhaps  not  so  strange.  The  final  defeat  of  the 
"  Anti-Tobacconists  "  came  with  the  introduction  of 
more  perfect  implements  —  the  cigar,  the  cigarette, 
and,  ultimately,  the  briar  pipe.  Victory  was  grad- 
ual. Queen  Victoria,  Mr.  Gladstone,  and  Mr.  Rus- 
kin  did  not  smoke.  Men,  for  a  time,  did  not  light 
their  cigars  until  they  had  shut  their  doors  behind 
them;  they  changed  into  embroidered  caps  and  jack- 
ets in  order  to  avoid  having  their  hair  and  their  ordi- 
nary coats  permeated  with  the  odour  of  the  herb; 
they  refrained  from  smoking  before  ladies,  and  the 
idea  that  smoking  was  vulgar  and  indecent  still  leaves 
a  few  traces  behind  it,  as  in  the  absurd  rule  of  some 
Cambridge  colleges  that  smoking  is  not  allowed  in 
the  courts  before  dark.  The  briar  —  made  from 
the  root  of  the  bruyer,  or  French  white  heath  — 
was  the  weapon  with  which  the  smokers  finally  routed 
their  opponents.  Today  there  is  nothing  monstrous 
in  Charles  Lamb's  wish  that  his  last  breath  should 

199 


Books  in  General 

be  drawn  in  through  a  pipe  and  exhaled  in  a  pun;  and 
a  Kingsley  would  not  have  to  conceal  caches  of  pipes 
under  bushes  and  hedges  on  his  rural  walks,  but 
would  emerge  from  the  rectory  with  the  vulcanite 
between  his  teeth.  In  one  only  respect  we  have  not 
yet  equalled  the  achievements  of  our  ancestors.  No 
boy  at  Eton  has,  in  our  time,  been  flogged  for  refus- 
ing to  smoke.  But  the  precedent  for  that  occurred 
in  1665  during  the  Great  Plague,  against  which  to- 
bacco was  considered  a  defence. 

Mr.  Apperson  confines  his  attention  to  England. 
Had  he  gone  beyond  these  shores,  he  might  have 
found  some  curious  facts.  In  seventeenth-century 
Russia,  for  example,  smoking  was  forbidden  under 
penalty  of  having  the  nose  cut  off,  a  penalty  which 
might  have  been  deemed  more  appropriate  to  snuff- 
taking.  In  Persia,  formerly,  smoking  was  a  capital 
offence,  the  belief  being  held  that  it  made  people  in- 
fertile. The  sections  on  Smoking  in  Church  and 
Smoking  by  Women  are  very  interesting;  in  the  re- 
marks on  the  medicinal  use  of  tobacco  I  miss  (per- 
haps I  have  overlooked)  a  notice  of  the  fact  that  at 
one  time  doctors  used  to  prescribe  "  syrup  of  to- 
bacco "  for  various  ailments;  those  who  occasionally 
take  involuntary  sips  of  this  syrup  will  shudder  at 
the  thought.  Mr.  Apperson's  remarks  on  the  old 
tobacconists'  signs  are  very  interesting;  the  Black 
Boys,  the  Highlanders,  and  the  Sir  Walter  Raleighs 
have  now  almost  all  disappeared.  The  survivors 
lead  a  solitary  and  unhonoured  life;  the  last  of  the 
200 


Tobacco 

London  Highlanders  stands  outside  a  linoleum  em- 
porium, and  a  romantic  tobacconist  in  the  centre  of 
London  who  recently  tried  to  fix  up  a  wooden  effigy 
of  Sir  Walter  outside  his  shop  found  that  passers-by 
would  insist  on  breaking  off  its  protuberant  parts 
with  their  walking-sticks.  Tobacco  is  now  com- 
pletely victorious.  Cigarettes  are  served  out  as  ra- 
tions to  our  troops,  and  the  old  female  objection 
has  so  thoroughly  broken  down  that  the  next  Great 
Offensive  against  the  habit  may  possibly  be  based  on 
the  contention  that  it  is  effeminate.  The  result  of 
the  general  spread  of  smoking,  however,  is  that  in- 
terest in  it  is  less  keen.  You  cannot  be  an  enthusiast 
for  a  habit  that  is  shared  by  the  whole  human  race. 
Mr.  Apperson,  who  writes  in  the  traditional  style, 
does  occasionally  refer  to  the  virtues  of  smokers  as 
though  they  were  still  a  sort  of  eclectic  fraternity. 
But  that  is  now  anachronistic.  The  Kaiser  is  one  of 
his  fellow-smokers,  and  the  late  George  Smith  was 
probably  another.  It  is  as  absurd  to  talk  now  of 
the  geniality  and  reasonableness  of  Smokers  as  it 
would  be  to  propound  the  peculiar  philosophic  pow- 
ers of  men  with  two  legs,  or  to  suggest  that  the  Brit- 
ish Constitution  is  kept  intact  mainly  owing  to  the 
efforts  of  those  members  of  the  community  whose 
hair  is  neither  green  nor  purple.  A  History  of 
Sleeping  is  Inconceivable;  the  time  will  come  when 
smoking  also  will  cease  to  have  a  history.  A  few 
more  club  libraries  have  to  be  thrown  open  to  it;  a 
few  more  restaurants  have  to  abandon  their  silly  bias 
against  pipes;  theatres  have  to  come  into  line  with 

20I 


Books  in  General 

music-halls;  and  the  pipe,  now  forcing  an  entrance 
among  middle-class  women-workers,  may  possibly 
win  the  last  of  its  conquests.  Beyond  this  no  future 
"  history  "  is  easily  conceivable  for  tobacco;  unless 
it  goes  out  of  fashion  again,  which  seems  most  un- 
likely. It  has  become  an  integral  and  universal  ele- 
ment in  the  social  life  of  mankind,  which  has  decided 
that,  on  the  whole,  it  is  worth  going  on  with  an  in- 
flamed palate,  a  furred  tongue,  a  husky  throat,  and 
a  deadened  sense  of  smell.  And  it  will,  possibly, 
have  little  more  literature.  This  last  fact,  however, 
cannot  be  deplored,  for  good  panegyrics  of  it  are 
few.  For  myself  I  like  as  well  as  any  of  its  eulogies 
the  following  terse  epigram  recorded  by  Steinmetz 
of  The  Smoker's  Guide: 

Poor  wretch!     I  don't  fancy  that  anything  pays 
For  toiling  and  moiling ;  I  live  all  my  days 
A  sort  of  a  god,  with  my  bakky  and  jug, 
And  as  jolly  and  snug  as  a  bug  in  a  rug. 

That  dithyramb  was  the  work  of  a  British  Peer  — 
Lord  Southesk. 


202 


Charles  Churchill 


I 


OBSERVE  In  a  new  biography  of  Wilkes  a  sur- 
prising reference  to  his  friend  Charles  Church- 
ill.     "  He  was,"  says  the  author, 


''  a  dull  fellow  at  the  best,  without  a  spark  of  hu- 
mour, having  little  merit  save  a  species  of  rugged 
vehemence.*' 

Probably  most  who  see  it  will  take  this  judgment  at 
its  face-value,  for  Churchill  is  very  little  read  now. 
But  I  feel  I  must  lift  up  my  small  voice  in  protest, 
even  though  it  fade  away  into  nothing  in  a  week. 

The  Rev.  C.  Churchill,  in  his  day  the  most  popu- 
lar of  satirists,  had  several  sparks  of  humour,  wrote 
remarkably  skilful  verse,  and  in  Gotham  even  pro- 
duced what  Cowper,  who  was  fairly  fastidious, 
called  "  a  noble  and  beautiful  "  poem.  He  was  not 
an  altogether  admirable  or  pleasant  person:  few 
satirists  are.  He  did  not  invariably  attack  things 
that  ought  to  be  attacked:  few  satirists  do.  Never- 
theless, though  he  was  malicious,  foul-mouthed,  de- 
bauched, and  addicted  to  lucrative  hack-work  —  in 
short,  a  thorough  disgrace  to  the  cloth  —  he  had  a 
sense  of  humour,  and  he  was  not  always  a  dull  poet. 
He  was  good  enough  to  be  entitled  to  a  place  in  the 

203 


Books  in  General 

notable  succession  of  satirists,  from  Hall  and  Donne 
to  Marvell  and  Oldham,  from  Dryden  and  Pope  to 
Byron,  who  have  exposed  the  vices  of  society  and  the 
weaknesses  of  their  enemies  in  the  rhymed  penta- 
meter couplet, 

Churchill  was  born  in  1731.  He  was  extraordi- 
narily prolific.  This  at  least  had  to  be  acknowl- 
edged by  Dr.  Johnson,  who  liked  neither  his  morals 
nor  his  politics:  "  To  be  sure  he  is  a  tree  that  can- 
not produce  good  fruit:  he  only  bears  crabs.  But, 
sir,  a  tree  that  produces  a  great  many  crabs  is  better 
than  a  tree  which  produces  only  a  few."  His  most 
celebrated  poem  was  the  Rosciad,  a  metrical  treatise 
on  contemporary  actors,  which  is  more  vigorous,  and 
I  should  think  more  truthful,  than  any  dramatic  critic 
would  dare  to  write  in  an  age  of  libel-actions.  It 
wants  a  good  many  explanatory  footnotes,  and  its 
wit  can  scarcely  be  called  delicate;  but  it  still  makes 
very  good  reading.  There  are  good  passages  in 
The  Ghost  and  The  Duellist.  My  own  favourite, 
however,  is  The  Prophecy  of  Fafuine,  a  fantasia  on 
Scotland  and  the  Scotch  which  beats  in  extravagance 
anything  else  which  the  mid-century  peaceful  invasion 
of  Scots  called  forth  from  the  subjected  English. 
Here  the  Tory  Johnson  and  the  demagogic  Church- 
ill were  on  common  ground: 

Waft  me,  some  muse,  to  Tweed's  inspiring  stream, 
Where  all  the  little  Loves  and  Graces  dream; 
JFhere,  slowly  winding,  the  dull  waters  creep, 
204 


Charles  Churchill 

And  seem  themselves  to  own  the  powers  of  sleep; 
Where  on  the  surface  lead,  like  feathers,  swittis; 
There  let  me  bathe  my  yet  unhallozved  limbs, 
As  once  a  Syrian  bathed  in  Jordan's  flood. 
Wash  of  my  native  stains,  correct  that  blood 
irhich  mutinies  at  call  of  English  pride. 
And,  deaf  to  prudence,  rolls  a  patriot  tide. 

But  his  finest  efforts  in  exaggeration  come  when  he 
describes  the  utter  nakedness  and  hungriness  of  Scot- 
land: 

Jockey,  zvhose  manly,  high-boned  cheeks  to  crown, 

JFith  freckles  spotted,  flamed  the  golden  down. 

With  meikle  art  could  on  the  bag-pipe  play, 

E'en  from  the  rising  to  the  setting  day; 

Sawney  as  long  without  remorse  could  bazvl 

Home's  madrigals,  and  ditties  from  Fin  gal; 

Oft  at  his  strains,  all  natural  though  rude, 

The  Highland  lass  forgot  her  zvant  of  food, 

And,  zvhilst  she  scratch' d  her  lover  into  rest, 

Sank  pleased,  though  hungry,  on  her  Sawney's  breast. 

Far  as  the  eye  could  reach,  no  tree  was  seen. 

Earth,  clad  in  russet,  scorn' d  the  lively  green; 

The  plague  of  locusts  they  secure  defy. 

For  in  three  hours  a  grasshopper  must  die ; 

No  living  thing,  whate'er  its  food,  feasts  there, 

But  the  cameleon,  zvho  can  feast  on  air. 

No  birds,  except  as  birds  of  passage,  flew; 

No  bee  was  known  to  hum,  nor  dove  to  coo: 

No  streams,  as  amber  smooth,  as  amber  clear, 

205 


Books  in  General 

Were  seen  to  glide  or  heard  to  warble  here; 
Rebellion's  spring,  which  through  the  country  ran, 
Furnish'd,  with  bitter  draughts,  the  steady  clan; 
No  flowers  embalm' d  the  air,  but  one  white  rose, 
Which,  on  the  tenth  of  June,  by  instinct  blows ; 
Bv  instinct  blows  at  morn,  and  when  the  shades 
Of  drizzly  eve  prevail,  by  instinct  fades. 

The  white  rose  is  the  flower  of  Jacobitism,  which,  it 
is  suggested,  is  not  remembered  for  364  days  in  the 
year  when  something  is  to  be  made  out  of  the  House 
of  Windsor.  The  climax  of  the  passage  is  reached 
with  the  line : 

Jnd  half-starved  spiders  prey'd  on  half-starved 
flies. 

The  imagery  of  the  poet  describing  national  penury 
and  leanness  could  scarcely  go  farther  than  that. 

Churchill  died  at  thirty-three,  principally  of  drunk- 
enness. He  wrote  his  own  epitaph,  "  Life  to  the  last 
enjoy'd,  here  Churchill  lies,"  and  painted  his  own 
portrait  with  great  force  in  Independence.  He  was 
a  hearty,  honest  ruffian;  he  was  loyal  to  his  friends 
and,  after  his  fashion,  loved  his  country. 


206 


Commonplace  Books 

A  COMMONPLACE  book  is  defined  by  Web- 
ster as  "  a  book  in  which  passages  or  events 
are  set  down  or  recorded  as  important  for 
future  use  or  reference,"  and  Swift  is  quoted: 
"  Whatever,  in  my  reading,  occurs  concerning  this 
...  I  do  never  fail  to  set  it  down  by  way  of  com- 
monplace." "  Important  "  is  a  word  with  an  im- 
portant sound;  though  it  would  apply,  no  doubt,  to 
commonplace  books  like  that  enormous  one  of  Rob- 
ert Southey's  which  is  full  of  very  long  and  usually 
dull  extracts  from  works  of  philosophy,  divinity  and 
history.  The  lexicographer  is  vague  as  to  the 
sources  of  the  "  passages  set  down."  But  there  is, 
to  me  at  any  rate,  a  flavour  of  the  second-hand  about 
the  term,  and  I  should  not  apply  it  to  a  notebook  in 
which  a  man  put  down  nothing  but  his  own  happy 
thoughts,  with  an  eye  on  future  platforms,  dinner- 
tables  or  articles,  or  merely  with  a  view  to  private 
self-gratification.  One  suspects  that  this  type  of 
notebook  is  more  common  amongst  modern  men  of 
letters  than  the  old  book  of  extracts.  One  does 
know  some  writers  whose  strange  profuseness  of  quo- 
tation suggests  that  they  stick  to  the  old  custom  on 
the  sly  —  since,  for  some  reason  imperceptible  to 
me,  it  seems  to  be  considered  altogether  more  tal- 

207 


Books  in  General 

ented  to  fork  a  quotation  out  of  your  memory  than 
to  rummage  for  one  in  an  old  notebook.  But  the 
habit  has  evidently  declined.  Perhaps  we  have  too 
little  leisure.  Perhaps  we  have  lost  the  literary  col- 
lector's spirit.  Perhaps  we  are  too  lazy.  As  far  as 
I  am  concerned  this  last  is  certainly  the  cause. 
Twice  in  the  first  bloom  of  my  manhood  I  decided 
to  go  through  my  books,  turn  up  the  pages  which 
enthusiasm  had  dog's-eared  or  otherwise  defaced, 
and  tabulate  "  for  future  use  or  reference  "  the  best 
remarks  of  the  world's  authors.  The  two  books 
are  still  with  me.  One  begins  with  twenty  pages  of 
Gibbon,  beautifully  transcribed  and  with  neat  lines 
ruled  between  each  slice  of  cynicism  or  profanity; 
and  thereafter  the  pages  cry  to  be  filled  and  none 
heareth  them.  The  other  similarly  opens  with 
flowers  from  Lord  Verulam,  and  then  slides  down 
into  the  mean  status  of  an  address-book.  One  sim- 
ply cannot.  It  is  too  much  bother.  Henceforward, 
If  I  am  observed  quoting  Gibbon  or  Bacon,  it  will  be 
clear  where  the  quotations  come  from  —  though,  as 
a  fact,  I  seldom  remember  my  little  compilations  un- 
til too  late. 

Mr.  Austin  Dobson's  A  Bookman's  Budget  Is  a 
commonplace  book  by  any  definition:  and  a  very 
characteristic  one.  We  all  of  us  know  people  who 
fill  their  apartments  with  every  sort  of  object  of  art: 
Chinese  dragons,  Hepplewhite  chairs,  bureaux  and 
commodes,  plates,  jugs,  basins,  gods,  swords,  paper- 
knives,  Greek  heads,  busts  of  Rousseau,  chessmen, 
steel-engravings,  miniatures,  lecterns,  old  morocco 
208 


Commonplace  Books 

bindings,  oak,  ebony.  Ivory,  malachite,  alabaster, 
Lord  knows  what,  and  water-colours  by  the  proprie- 
tor. Of  such  the  prime  example  was  Horace  Wal- 
pole:  and  since  he  was  a  man  of  taste,  a  man  with 
likes  and  dislikes  for  which  he  could  give  reasons, 
we  may  be  certain  that  his  collection,  however  varie- 
gated in  origins  and  character,  and  however  prepon- 
deratingly  designed  for  "  reference  "  rather  than  for 
"  use,"  had  somehow  a  unity  about  it  which  differ- 
entiated it  from  the  limbless  and  trunkless  higgledy- 
piggledy  of  the  old  curiosity  shop.  Mr.  Dobson's 
volume  Is  precisely  such  a  collection  of  works  of  art 
and  "  curios."  Anything  goes  In  as  long  as  It  has 
amused,  touched  or  Interested  him,  including  pass- 
ages from  his  own  books.  And  all  the  oddments  in 
this  strange  miscellany  are  linked  by  personality. 
It  is  with  something  of  a  shock  that  one  comes  across 
a  batch  of  war-poems,  about  Belgium,  &c.  But  It  Is 
all  right:  even  when  he  Is  writing  a  poem  about  Bel- 
gium this  Inveterate  connoisseur  makes  It  a  Roundel. 
It  Is  not  very  successful,  but  no  one  else  could  have 
done  it  without  being  preposterous. 

Mr.  Dobson's  extracts  come  out  of  hundreds  of 
authors  of  all  ages.  But  the  eighteenth  century  Is 
dominant.  His  illustrations  are  mostly  silhouettes, 
with  a  portrait  of  Lord  George  Gordon  and  a  quaint 
Blake;  and,  making  an  extract  from  an  author  so 
modern  as  William  Morris,  he  characteristically 
pitches  on  Morris's  pretty  Inscription  for  a  four- 
poster  bed.     There  are  a  great  number  of  anecdotes 

209 


Books  in  General 

about  men  of  letters,  statesmen  and  clergymen,  and 
many  odd  literary  collector's  "  facts."  In  one  place 
we  get  a  little  group  of  extracts  illustrating  the  futil- 
ity of  pedants  and  cocksure  critics,  Macaulay  in 
1850,  said  that  since  1825  —  Dickens,  Thackeray, 
Tennyson  and  Browning,  not  to  mention  others,  were 
hard  at  it  —  no  English  book  had  been  written  which 
would  be  read  in  1900.  In  another  we  are  pre- 
sented with  the  fact  that  Dr.  Arnold  had  read  Hum- 
phrey Clinker  fifty  times.  I  don't  think  this  fact 
comes  into  Mr.  Lytton  Strachey's  biographical  study 
of  Arnold;  it  gives  him  quite  another  complexion. 
Humphrey  Clinker,  too;  a  book  which,  compared 
with  Peregrine  Pickle,  has  been  neglected,  but  a  far 
finer  piece  of  art.  Mr.  Dobson  hunts  up  the  origin 
of  the  phrase,  "  the  Republic  of  Letters,"  makes  notes 
on  the  will  of  Andrew  Millar,  the  publisher,  on  fam- 
ily pews,  on  London  topography,  on  the  pronuncia- 
tion of  the  word  "  Pamela,"  on  Fielding's  tomb,  and 
on  Cobbett's  observation  that  "  foot-notes  "  should 
be  written  "  fool-notes."  Then  he  turns  aside  to  do 
justice  to  Tom  Hood  and  —  a  stranger  and  more 
striking  performance  —  to  look  for  and  to  discover 
a  really  fine  passage  from  the  works  of  George 
Augustus  Sala.  "  Cromwell's  Motto  "  and  "  Liter- 
ary Breakfasts  "  elbow  sonnets  by  Andrew  Lang  and 
epigrams  by  deceased  Frenchmen,  and  almost  on  the 
last  page  we  are  informed  that  on  April  4,  1663, 
Pepys  gave  to  seven  or  eight  guests  a  dinner  (pre- 
pared by  a  single  maid,  ye  housewives!)  consisting 
of:  — 
210 


Commonplace  Books 

"  a  fricasee  of  rabbits  and  chickens,  a  leg  of  mutton 
boiled,  three  carps  in  a  dish,  a  great  dish  of  a  side  of 
lambe,  a  dish  of  roasted  pigeons,  a  dish  of  four  lob- 
sters, three  tarts,  a  lamprey  pie  (a  most  rare  pie) ,  a 
dish  of  anchovies,  good  wine  of  several  sorts,  and  all 
things  mighty  noble  and  to  my  great  content." 

The  scattered  poems  are  mostly  graceful.  The 
short  epigrams  are  the  best,  particularly  the  four  on 
Art,  which  are  extremely  close  imitations  of  the  real 
eighteenth  century  article.  As,  for  instance,  Silent 
Criticism:  — 

/  read  my  rhymes  to  Jack,  who  straight 
Slips  off  to  Sleep's  dominion; 

Then  yawns,  when  I  expostulate  — 
"  IFhy  sleep  is  .   .   .   my  opinion/" 

But  I  cannot  think  Mr.  Dobson's  epitaph  on  Queen 
Victoria  a  masterpiece  :  — 

Great  Queen,  great  Lady,  Mother  most  of  all! 
Beyond  the  turmoil  of  Earth's  hopes  and  fears, 
Hozv  should  you  need  the  tribute  of  our  tears  — 

Our  helpless,  useless  tears!     But  they  must  fall. 

It  is  odd,  incidentally,  to  run  across  this  in  the  same 
week  in  which  one  encounters  the  statement  in  Sir  C. 
Dilke's  Life  that  after  the  Great  White  Queen's 
funeral  a  select  quorum  of  the  Privy  Council  met 
with  relief,  and  an  unwonted  cheerfulness  plain  upon 
its  face. 

211 


The  Songs  of  the  Trenches 

^  |~^tIERE  has  been  a  general  desire  that  some- 
I  body  would  collect  the  folk-songs  of  the 
-M-  Army.  The  thing  has  now  been  done. 
Tommy's  Tunes  (Erskine  Macdonald)  is  described 
as  "  A  Comprehensive  Collection  of  Soldiers'  Songs, 
Marching  Melodies,  Rude  Rhymes,  and  Popular 
Parodies,  Composed,  Collected,  and  Arranged  on 
Active  Service  with  the  B.E.F.  by  F.  T.  Nettlelng- 
ham,  2nd  Lt.  R.F.C."  As  the  title  suggests  Mr. 
Nettleingham  has  not  specialized  in  any  class  of 
song.  He  gives  not  merely  the  songs  which  have 
come  during  the  war  from  no  one  knows  where,  and 
the  burlesques  of  music-hall  ditties  and  hymns;  but  a 
number  of  traditional  songs  and  some  compositions, 
largely  drawn  from  the  R.F.C,  that  are  obviously 
the  work  of  clever  individuals.  These  are  interest- 
ing as  extras.  So  are  the  old  songs,  but  not  all  those 
to  which  Mr.  Nettleingham  refers  as  heirlooms  of 
the  Old  Army  are  peculiarly  Army  songs,  and  some 
are  widely  diffused  among  the  population.  Among 
those  for  which  he  makes  no  such  claim  is  The  Green 
Grass  Grew  All  Round.  I  suppose  that  collectors 
have  printed  it  before.  They  may  even  have  de- 
cided that  it  is  an  allegory,  religious  or  otherwise, 
like  /  IV ill  Sing  You  One  —  O.  But  I  have  cer- 
tainly never  seen  It  In  print  before.     Yet  It  Is  one  of 

212 


The  Songs  of  the  Trenches 

the  most  widely  dispersed  of  our  popular  songs; 
whatever  music-hall  ballads  come  and  go,  this  goes 
on,  and  you  are  liable  to  hear  parties  of  youths  sing- 
ing it  almost  anywhere  in  the  country.  Several 
songs  of  this  sort  are  given;  but  the  greatest  interest 
must  lie  in  those  queer,  unique  songs  —  whimsical, 
ironical,  grumbling  —  which  have  come  into  being 
in  the  Army  during  the  war,  and  many  of  which,  in 
the  true  fashion  of  folk-poetry,  exist  in  numerous 
versions. 

The  most  famous  of  these,  and  the  type  of  most 
of  them,  is  /  JVant  to  Go  Home,  with  its  utter  fed- 
upness.  It  was  pretty  early.  I  remember  the  first 
time  I  heard  of  it.  A  gunner  officer  (he  is  dead 
now)  sent  it  to  me,  with  the  tune  roughly  dotted 
down.  He  said  that  his  men  would  sing  that  melan- 
choly tune  very  quietly  and  slowly  when  grooming 
their  horses,  and  that  he  had  never  heard  anything 
in  his  life  which  moved  him  more.  The  difference 
between  various  versions  of  it  usually  lies  in  the 
third  line.  Mr.  Nettlelngham  gives  "  Where 
there  are  shells  and  Jack  Johnsons  galore  " ;  of  those 
I  have  heard,  I  think  "  For  oh  the  Jack  Johnsons, 
they  make  such  a  roar,"  sounds  likelier  to  the  gen- 
eral.    The  full  verse  is : 

/  want  to  go  home 

I  want  to  go  home 
For  oh!  the  Jack  Johnsons  they  make  such  a  roar 
I  don't  want  to  go  to  the  trenches  no  more, 

213 


Books  in  General 

/  want  to  go  over  the  sea 
Where  the  AUeymayis  can't  snipe  at  me. 
Oh,  my,  I  don't  want  to  die, 
I  want  to  go  home. 

Another  song,  which  would  do  equally  well  as  the 
type,  is  that  which  appears  on  the  wrapper  of  this 
book: 

When  this  ruddy  war  is  over, 

01  how  happy  I  shall  be, 

the  tune  of  which  seems  to  derive  from  Massa's  in 
the  Cold  Ground.  Mr.  Nettleingham's  discretion 
about  "  ruddy  "  is  not  altogether  kept  up;  occasion- 
ally he  admits  things  which  make  one  think  one  is 
reading  a  collection  of  Tom  D'Urfey's  instead  of  a 
twentieth-century  book.  Of  Grousing,  another  of 
the  sort,  the  compiler  says  that  Company  Comman- 
ders have  been  known  to  suppress  it  "  when  men 
have  spent  long  hours  on  the  march."  It  is  unmiti- 
gated. It  goes  to  the  tune  of  Holy,  Holy,  Holy, 
and  the  last  verse  is: 

Marching,  Marching,  Marching, 
Always  ruddy  well  marching. 
Marching  all  the  morning, 
And  marching  all  the  night. 
Marching,  Marching,  Marching, 
Always  ruddy  well  marching. 
Roll  on  till  my  time  is  up 
And  I  shall  march  no  more. 
214 


The  Songs  of  the  Trenches 

Another  of  the  sort  is,  JVhy  Did  We  Join  the 
Armyf  — 

Why  did  we  join  the  Army,  hoys? 
Why  did  we  join  the  Army? 
Why  did  we  come  to  Salisbury  Plain? 
We  must  have  been  ruddy  well  balmy. 
Fol-the-rol-lol,  &'c. 

One  of  the  most  widespread  is  that  which,  sung  to 
the  tune  of  The  Church's  One  Foundation,  has  been 
adapted  to  all  sorts  of  branches,  and  of  which  one 
version  is: 

We  are  Fred  Karno's  Army, 
A  jolly  fine  lot  we  are; 
Fred  Karno  is  our  Captain 
Charlie  Chaplin  our  O.C. 
And  when  we  get  to  Berlin, 
The  Kaiser  he  will  say: 
Hochf     Hochf     Mein  Gottf 
What  a  jolly  fine  lot 
Are  the  2  —  ^th  R.E.,  T. 

In  most  variations  the  second  couplet  is : 

We  cannot  fight,  we  cannot  shoot. 
What  earthly  use  are  we? 

or  words  to  that  effect. 

Of  the  adaptations  of  The  Tarpaulin  Jacket,  the 

215 


Books  in  General 

cleverest  is  that  in  which  the  dying  airman  requests 
his  mechanics  to  reassemble  the  engine,  the  parts  of 
which  are  embedded  in  various  sections  of  his  body. 
A  less  literary  one  is : 

Oh  had  I  the  wings  of  an  Avro, 

Chorus:     "  of  an  Avro." 
Then  far,  far  away  I  would  soar, 

"  would  soar." 
Right  of  to  my  pals  down  in  Holland 

"  in  Holland." 
And  rest  there  the  rest  of  the  war, 

"  the  war." 

I  cannot  go  on  quoting  indefinitely,  but  one  may  men- 
tion that  even  the  little  repetitive  marching  scraps 
are  not  omitted.  Words  and  music  are  given  of 
Hoo-Ha  ("  There's  the  man  with  the  big  red  nose, 
Hoo  Ha,  Hoo  Ha  Ha !  ") ,  and  Left,  I^eft,  which  is 
about  the  most  epigrammatic  of  the  lot. 

Mr.  Nettleingham  asks  for  supplementary  songs. 
He  has  taken  so  much  trouble  with  his  collection 
that  he  has  probably  got  almost  everything  that  has 
had  a  general  circulation.  But  there  are  no  doubt 
many  more  good  regimental  ones.  One  that  reached 
me  from  a  Fusilier  battalion  the  other  day  may  or 
may  not  be  a  local  adaptation  of  a  song  common  to 
many  regiments.  It  is  a  chorus  only,  to  the  tune  of 
Hold  Your  Hand  Out,  Naughty  Boy,  and  runs : 


2i6 


The  Songs  of  the  Trenches 

Hold  your  head  down,  Fusilier, 
Hold  your  head  down,  Fusilier, 
There's  a  bloody  great  Hun 
fVith  a  bloody  great  gun 
fVho'll  shoot  you 
Who'll  shoot  you: 
There's  a  sniper  up  a  tree 
Waiting  for  you  and  me. 

If  you  want  to  get  back  to  your  home  any 
more. 
Hold  your  head  down,  Fusilier. 

It  is  sung  in  the  London  vernacular,  and  is  certainly 
in  the  Flanders  tradition. 

It  may  be  observed,  by  the  way,  that  Mr.  Nettle- 
ingham  says  in  his  preface  —  every  soldier  who  has 
mentioned  it  to  me  has  certainly  said  the  same  thing 
—  that  Tipperary  "  was  never  Tommy's  song."  It 
merely  happened  that  a  Daily  Mail  correspondent 
heard  a  few  troops  of  the  Expeditionary  Force  sing- 
ing it  at  Boulogne.  It  was  a  chance  that  he  did  not 
hear  other  troops  singing  something  else.  In  the 
anthologist's  opinion  the  most  popular  song  in  the 
Army  is,  beyond  question,  Annie  Laurie. 


217 


The  Limits  of  Imitation 

SOMEBODY  suggests  that  it  did  not  much  mat- 
ter if  Stephen  PhiUips  was  a  bit  reminiscent 
of  other  poets  at  times,  for  Wordsworth  was 
at  his  best  when  he  was  most  Miltonic. 

Let  me  observe  at  once  that  I  have  no  sympathy  at 
all  with  the  kind  of  critics  who  are  always  nosing 
about  after  verbal  plagiarism.  Tennyson  was  think- 
ing of  these  when  he  complained  that  it  was  impos- 
sible to  remark  that  "  the  sea  roars  "  without  being 
informed  as  to  the  exact  passage  in  Homer  from 
which  the  observation  had  been  stolen.  It  is  ridicu- 
lous to  suggest  that  all  resemblances  mean  plagiar- 
ism; it  is  ridiculous  also  to  hold  that  every  plagiar- 
ism must  necessarily  be  a  reprehensible  weakness. 
As  everybody  knows,  all  great  poets  have  learnt 
from  their  predecessors,  all  have  been  influenced  by 
their  predecessors,  and  most  have  borrowed  direct 
from  their  predecessors.  And  a  good  thing  too. 
If  a  new  and  effective  word,  process  of  thought, 
rhythmical  device,  or  stanza  form  is  hit  upon  by  one 
man,  it  is  all  to  the  good  if  other  people  make  use  of 
his  discoveries.  Writers  may  even,  if  they  like, 
cold-bloodedly  study  the  manner  in  which  particular 
effects  have  been  produced  and  endeavour  to  produce 
similar  effects  by  similar  means.  There  is  no  limit 
2i8 


The  Limits  of  Imitation 

to  the  use  which  an  orlghial  writer  can  make  of  other 
writers.  But  he  can  escape  the  charge  of  imitation 
on  one  condition  only:  and  that  is  that  he  should  be 
more  himself  than  anybody  else.  If  he  really  is  any 
good,  we  may  identify  things  he  owes  to  other  peo- 
ple, but  we  shall  feel  his  individuality  all  the  time. 
We  shall  not,  even  when  he  is  obviously  plagiarizing, 
have  the  impression  of  one  who  has  heard  some- 
body's else's  voice  and  is  automatically  mimicking 
it  because  he  Is  dominated  by  it,  or  of  one  who  has  no 
natural  force  compelling  him  to  express  himself  and 
who  consequently  sits  down  and  makes  things  in  con- 
ventional moulds.  Taking  any  other  basis,  one 
would  soon  be  led  to  the  ridiculous  view  that  there 
is  no  such  thing  as  bad  imitation. 

Example  is  best.  Suppose  some  admirer  of  Mr. 
Lloyd  George  or  the  Kaiser  were  to  write  an  Ode  to 
him  in  the  course  of  which  he  said: 

The  light  of  the  might  of  thy  right  burns  bright  like 
the  radiant  bow  of  the  god  Apollo, 
And  deep  in  the  dark  of  the  dank  and  dim  damp 
dungeons  of  Death  thy  foemen  lie, 
And  the  flight  of  thy  fleet  sweet  feet  is  fast  and  fast 
is  the  wind  of  the  wings  that  follow, 
And  loud  the  joy  of  the  quenchless  sea  and  the 
mirth  of  the  wide  inexhaustible  sky. 

Or  suppose  that  some  one  with  a  less  favourable 
opinion  of  one  of  these  eminent  statesmen  were  to 
break  out  with: 

219 


Books  in  General 

He  spake.     And  as  by  Indus  banks  some  toad, 

Beastly  and  venomous,  before  the  sun 

Sets  purpure,  and  the  clouds  of  heaven  dark 

Spread  for  his  proud  and  fallen  majesty 

A  regal  couch  magnific  and  stupend, 

So  he,  unconscious  of  the  ruin  impending. 

Sat. 

It  would  be  remarked  infallibly  that  not  only  were 
these  passages  meaningless  (as,  indeed,  they  are), 
but  that  the  authors  were  mere  imitators  of  Swin- 
burne and  Milton,  the  mechanical  quality  of  whose 
imitations  made  it  unmistakably  clear  that  they  were 
incapable  of  writing  anything  worth  reading. 
There  are  many  writers,  in  fact,  who,  whenever  they 
sit  down  to  write,  have  other  people's  tunes  running 
in  their  heads  so  persistently  that  their  thoughts  fall 
involuntarily  into  the  ready-made  framework,  which 
—  as  they  are  not  the  thoughts  of  the  man  who  made 
the  framework  —  they  do  not  in  reality  quite  fit. 
It  is  very  easy,  if  you  are  at  all  well-read,  to  compose 
on  this  plan.  If  you  are  content  to  be  an  imitator, 
you  may  safely  adopt  Sterne's  recipe  of  writing  down 
one  sentence  and  trusting  to  God  for  the  next.  The 
Lord  will  provide.  The  flow  will  come.  Every 
word  has  hallowed  associations,  every  sound  has 
familiar  sequences,  every  situation  has  established 
developments:  you  may  go  ahead  like  a  house  on 
fire.  But  the  result  might  as  well  be  in  the  house 
on  fire. 


220 


The  Limits  of  Imitation 

The  undesirable  and  damning  form  of  imitation 
may  be  defined  as  Parody  which  is  not  Meant  to  be 
Funny.  And  the  species  of  it  which  is  most  common 
is  Parody  not  of  one  writer,  but  of  a  whole  bundle  of 
writers.  This  kind  is  often  missed  by  critics  with  an 
inadequate  knowledge  of  the  body  of  modern  litera- 
ture, though  in  process  of  time  it  is  always  discov- 
ered. In  any  age  there  is  always  a  large  mass  of 
verse  and  of  prose  which  imitates  everybody  who 
has  gone  just  before.  A  sort  of  stock  compost  of 
manner  and  matter  is  produced;  all  can  grow  the 
flower,  for  all  have  got  the  seed.  You  read  a  hun- 
dred novels  and  concoct  a  hundred  and  first,  which 
is  the  G.C.M.  of  them  all.  I  think  as  I  write  of  a 
certain  kind  of  descriptive  passage  to  be  found  al- 
most anywhere.  Scores  of  novelists  write  it,  each 
using  a  formula  without  realizing  that  he  is  using  a 
formula.     This  is  the  kind  of  thing: 

"  Evening  came  quietly  over.  The  outlines  of 
things,  of  houses  and  trees  and  hedges,  softened  and 
dimmed  In  the  fading  light.  Low  in  the  west  a 
single  streak  of  flaming  orange  still  proclaimed  the 
sunken  sun.  The  fields  were  empty.  The  last 
labourer  had  gone  home.  A  deserted  plough,  which 
seemed  to  accentuate  the  solitude,  stood  by  the  near- 
est of  the  gnarled  and  forlorn  file  of  pollard  willows 
that  marked  the  course  of  the  stream.  A  little 
breeze  shivered  the  leaves,  and  fell  away  again.  An 
owl  hooted;  and,  from  some  distant  village,  a  dog 
barked  " 

221 


Books  in  General 

Or: 

"  The  storm  was  approaching.  From  north  and 
west  furious  black  battalions  of  clouds,  their  edges 
ragged  like  the  banners  of  a  desperate  army,  flew  to 
mid-heaven  for  the  fray.  The  wind  had  died  sud- 
denly down,  and  there  was  a  queer  stillness  over  the 
fields;  and  objects  stood  out  with  a  strange  clearness 
in  the  intensified  air.  Against  the  dark  background 
of  Billericay  Woods  the  gold  vane  of  Billericay 
Church,  etc." 

Now  this  kind  of  description  was  not  always  stale  or 
valueless.  Deliberately  foolish  as  the  above  two 
examples  are,  even  they  could  not  have  been  written 
by  an  Elizabethan.  There  is  something  in  them 
that  he  would  not  have  thought  of,  an  attitude  and  a 
progress  of  the  sentences.  They  are  dated,  within 
limits.  But  they  are  machine-made;  like  millions  of 
others  of  the  same  kind,  they  are  rubbish.  And  it 
is  a  bad  thing  to  be  taken  in  by  such  stuff. 

But  why  do  I  labour?  Am  I  a  Professor  of 
Tijbingen  that  I  should  even  set  one  foot  upon  the 
road  that  leads  men  to  write  volumes  on  the  Hun- 
dred Species  of  Plagiarism  and  the  Fundamentals  of 
the  Original  and  the  Derivative  in  Art?  Why 
should  one  argue  till  one  is  black  in  the  face?  All 
one  can  really  say  is  that  the  wind  bloweth  where  it 
listeth,  and  that  sometimes  it  bloweth  through  a 
hole  and  cometh  out  as  mere  wind. 

222 


Mr.  Lloyd  George  as  a  Vers- 
Librist 

BOOKS  about  Mr.  Lloyd  George  have  been 
pouring  from  the  press  ever  since  he  became 
Prime  Minister.  The  oddest  that  I  have 
seen  is  The  Wit  and  Wisdom  of  Lloyd  George,  by 
Dan  Rider.  It  is  an  anthology  of  Mr.  George's 
sagest  observations  and  most  effective  mots.  Very 
few  politicians  could  go  through  the  process  of  an- 
thologizing unscathed,  and  I  cannot  say  that  Mr. 
George's  tit-bits  are  as  effective  when  they  are  ex- 
tracted from  their  contexts  and  laid  coldly  on  paper 
as  they  were  when  we  first  heard  them.  Mr.  Rider, 
however,  has  no  such  doubts.  To  him  Mr.  George  is 
a  warrior-bard,  "  in  the  direct  line  of  the  old  Welsh 
tradition  and  spiritually  akin  to  the  House  of 
David."  Impressed  by  "  the  rhythmic  quality  of  his 
utterance,  his  eloquent  pauses  and  his  poetic  imagery 
—  that  artistic  shell  wherein  he  packs  the  high  ex- 
plosive of  his  thought,"  he  has 

"  ventured  to  arrange  that  parts  of  some  of  his 
speeches  shall  be  presented  in  the  form  of  free  verse, 
into  which  they  fall  naturally." 

It  was  to  these,  of  course,  that  one  turned  first. 

223 


Books  in  General 

The  longest  of  them  is  a  poem  on  Great  Britain, 
of  which  I  can  only  give  the  first  two  stanzas. 
These  go  thus : 

This  is  a  great  country, 

A  country  with  a  good  many  natural  advantages. 

That  it  is  an  island  is  not  a  matter  to  be  despised, 

Be  thankful  there  is  a  fine  old  moat  round  this  castle, 

Don't  take  advantage  of  that  to  do  nothing, 

JVork  all  the  harder  for  gratitude  that  you  have  got 

it, 
JVork  all  the  harder  to  preserve  it. 
They  are  trying  to  bridge  it. 

They  are  trying  to  make  it  impossible  for  us  to  use  it, 
Defend  your  island. 
Defend  the  moat  that  is  round  it. 

This  is  a  rich  land, 

Rich  in  its  soil, 

Rich  in  the  deposits  under  its  soil, 

Rich  in  its  people. 

Rich  in  its  past. 

Rich  in  its  present, 

God  knows  what  riches  there  are  in  its  future  — 

That  depends  upon  its  people  today. 

This  is  a  great  land. 

It  has  the  possession  of  a  great  past, 

Which  the  struggles  of  generations  for  freedom  have 
matured  into  the  traditions  of  liberty, 

That  have  enriched  it,  and  have  ennobled  its  insti- 
tutions, 

And  dignified  its  people. 

224 


Mr.  Lloyd  George  as  a  Vers-Librist 

I  hardly  think  that  It  comes  up  to  the  Psalmist,  and  I 
feel  that  the  rhythmical  effect  is  rather  that  of  the 
improvising  speaker  who  repeats  himself  whilst  wait- 
ing for  the  next  thought  to  occur.  But  one  cannot 
help  being  struck  with  the  close  resemblance  between 
a  prose  speech  thus  printed  and  the  ordinary  ad- 
vanced "  poems  "  one  sees  in  American  magazines. 
If  Mr.  George  is  a  poet,  it  is  rather  to  Ezra  than  to 
David  that  one  must  look  for  his  filiation. 

The  above  extract,  however,  is  not  representative 
of  Mr.  George  at  his  most  rhetorical.  When  he 
really  gets  going  he  almost  invariably  employs  more 
imagery  than  this.  And  he  has  two  sorts  of  im- 
agery, the  ordinary  and  the  perorational.  The  ordi- 
nary may  come  from  anywhere;  from  the  motor-car, 
the  aeroplane,  the  coal-mine,  or  the  tavern.  His 
range  is  futuristic  in  comparison  with  that,  say,  of 
Mr.  Churchill  or  Lord  Curzon,  both  of  whom  are 
good  at  dignified  Victorian  imagery.  When  he  is  in 
high  spirits  he  is  sometimes  as  fertile  as  Hudibras, 
who 

could  not  ope 
His  mouth  but  out  there  flew  a  trope. 

It  is  at  these  times,  when  he  is  making  light  play 
with  miscellaneous  metaphors,  that  he  is  at  his  best 
and  most  amusing.  I  cannot  agree  with  those  who 
think  he  comes  off  when  he  is  really  laying  himself 
out  to  be  solemn  or  sublime.  The  odd  forced  rasp 
that  comes  into  his  voice  at  those  times  is  reflected 

225 


Books  in  General 

in  a  certain  hollowness  of  language.  And  the  pau- 
city of  what  I  have  called  his  perorational  imagery 
gives  a  clue.  His  fancy  is  no  longer  working;  in- 
stead of  seeing  the  similitudes  of  things,  he  employs 
stock  decorations  which  he  believes  to  be  fitting:  and, 
looking  for  something  grand,  he  is  almost  invariably 
driven  back  to  the  mountains  and  the  rills  of  "  my 
own  little  country."  These  turn  up  with  monoto- 
nous iteration.  The  most  high-sounding  peroration 
Mr.  George  ever  delivered  was  that  of  his  speech  at 
Queen's  Hall,  September  19th,  19 14.  And  it  illus- 
trated more  strikingly  than  any  the  absence  of  that 
poetical  quality  of  which  Mr.  Rider  talks.  The 
Welsh  mountains  appeared  for  the  hundredth  time, 
and  the  language  —  directly  the  lower  levels  of  argu- 
ment and  satire  had  been  left  —  is  astonishingly  thin. 
The  most  characteristic  thing,  perhaps,  was  the  con- 
stant return  to  the  word  "  great,"  which,  after  being 
absent  for  pages,  does  duty  in  every  sort  of  connec- 
tion in  the  last  paragraphs.  In  the  very  last  para- 
graph of  all  we  get  "  great  mountains,"  "  great  spec- 
tacle," "  great  everlasting  things,"  "  great  peaks," 
"  great  pinnacle,"  "  great  mountain  peaks,"  and 
"  great  war."  It  is  almost  his  only  great  adjective. 
He  does  try  to  be  Biblical  sometimes.  In  the  cele- 
brated Paris  speech  he  used  the  unnatural  word 
"  yea  "  twice.  Each  time  it  gave  one  shudders  down 
the  back. 

I  do  not  think  that  Mr,  Rider  has  done  justice  to 
his  subject's  humour.  The  reader  could  have  done 
226 


i 


Mr.  Lloyd  George  as  a  Vers-Librist 

with  some  more  of  his  best  forgotten  satirical  pass- 
ages in  lieu  of  such  mots  as: 

"  The  average  Briton  is  too  shy  to  be  a  hero  until 
he  is  asked." 

"  Drink  is  doing  us  more  damage  in  the  war  than 
all  the  German  submarines  put  together." 

"  The  land  is  the  bountiful  mother  that  gives  to 
the  children  of  men  sustenance,  security,  and  rest." 

"  If  you  fill  the  lungs  of  the  children  with  good  air, 
you  empty  the  purses  of  the  parsons  of  good  gold." 

"  I  should  like  to  create  a  campaign  against  snob- 
bishness.     It  would  purge  the  nation." 

Even  such  of  these  remarks  as  are  sound  are  not  so 
brilliant  as  to  be  peculiarly  Lloyd-Georgian.  "  It  is 
singularly  unfair  that  future  generations  should  have 
to  bear  the  brunt  of  expenditure  incurred  by  their 
forefathers  "  is  a  quotation  that  the  friends  of  taxa- 
tion might  recall,  and  the  passages  about  the  miser- 
able amount  we  spend  on  education  are  still  highly 
relevant.  But  I  begin  to  impinge  upon  political  con- 
troversy. Leaving  the  merit  or  demerits  of  Mr. 
George's  character,  opinions  and  policy  out  of  ac- 
count, I  must  say  that,  although  I  enjoy  his  speeches 
as  "  turns,"  I  have  never  thought  them  very  striking 
as  literature,  and  that  Mr,  Rider's  collection  does 
them  much  less  than  justice.  I  must  therefore  close 
by  not  recommending  it. 


227 


William  Cartwright 

IN  the  seventeenth  century  there  were  several 
writers  who  had  great  contemporary  reputa- 
tions but  have  since  been  unduly  neglected. 
Cleveland  is  one;  Cartwright  is  another;  Randolph, 
a  Cambridge  don,  who  died  young  and  who  really 
had  the  makings  of  a  great  writer  in  him,  is  a  third. 
In  recent  years  an  edition  of  Cleveland  has  been 
published  in  America;  Randolph  was  edited,  in  a 
comprehensivq  but  characteristically  slovenly  way, 
by  the  late  W.  C.  Hazlitt,  and  now  there  appears 
(Cambridge  University  Press)  an  edition  of  Cart- 
wright's  poems  by  Mr.  R.  C.  Goffin,  who  dates  his 
preface  from  Gauhati,  Assam. 

William  Cartwright  was  born  in  1611,  took  holy 
orders,  and  died,  a  fervent  Royalist,  in  1643,  at  Ox- 
ford. King  Charles  went  into  mourning  for  him; 
he  had  dazzled  all  his  contemporaries  with  his  grace 
and  learning.  His  scholarship  was,  by  the  standards 
of  his  time,  universal;  he  was  personally  charming; 
he  was  a  fine  preacher;  and  he  wrote  before  he  was 
twenty-five  a  large  number  of  poems.  Whatever 
merits  may  be  found  in  the  best  of  them  no  modern 
reader  is  likely  to  find  them  as  a  whole  as  good  as 
his  friends  thought  them.  But  he  was  a  fascinating 
prodigy,  and  even  his  least  meritorious  work  is  suffi- 
ciently interesting  to  carry  one  on. 
228 


William  Cartwright 

A  good  deal  of  It  is  interesting  chiefly  on  account 
of  its  defects.  Mr.  Goffin  may  go  too  far  when  he 
says  the  "  metaphysicals  "  as  a  group  were  "  all  head 
and  no  heart."  That  statement  would  have  to  be 
qualified  considerably  before  it  could  be  applied  to 
Donne,  to  Crashaw  or  to  Vaughan.  But  it  can  be 
applied  almost  as  it  stands  to  Cartwright,  whose 
works  are  almost  entirely  exercises  in  intellectual  in- 
genuity. In  a  few  songs,  sensual  or  delicately  fanci- 
ful, he  escapes  from  his  conceits  and  writes  naturally 
and  musically;  and  in  a  few  personal  addresses  he 
speaks  directly  and  with  feeling,  notably  in  the  pass- 
age in  which  he  congratulates  the  Queen  on  bravery 
in  face  of  danger.  Sometime  his  fancies  go  trip- 
pingly, as  in: 

Tell  me  who  taught  thy  subtle  Eyes 
To  cheat  true  hearts  with  fallacies? 
Who  did  instruct  thy  Sighs  to  Lie? 
JVho  taught  thy  kisses  Sophistry? 
Believe  'tis  far  from  honest  Rigour; 

O  how  I  loath 

A  tutor' d  oath! 

ri  ne'er  come  nigh 

A  learned  Sigh, 
Nor  credit  vows  in  Mood  and  Figure. 

And,  rarely,  one  finds  in  him  a  stray  touch  of  sublim- 
ity, as  in  that  Image  in  which  he  symbolizes  the 
broken  residue  of  a  dream  that  is  left  to  us  when  we 
wake  from  the  dream : 

229 


Books  in  General 

As  Nilus  sudden  Ebbing,  here 
Doth  leave  a  scale,  and  a  scale  there, 
And  somewhere  else  perhaps  a  Fin, 
Which  by  his  stay  had  Fishes  been; 
So  Dreams,  which  overflowing  be, 
Departing  leave  Half-things.  .  .  . 

But  as  a  rule  his  "  game  of  similes  "  is  so  fantastic 
that  whatever  pleasure  we  find  in  them,  it  is  not  the 
pleasure  we  get  from  poetry.  His  Gnat  shows  his 
cleverness  at  its  highest  and  just  comes  off.  He  can- 
not congratulate  a  friend  on  a  son  and  heir  without 
beginning : 

Y'  are  now  transcribed,  and  Publike  View 
Perusing  finds  the  Coppy  true, 
JFithout  Erratas  new  crept  in, 
Fully  Complete  and  Genuine; 
And  nothing  wanting  can  espy. 
But  only  Bulk  and  quantity; 

and  this  is  simple  compared  to  his  effort  on  the  Great 
Frost.  A  few  of  his  poems  are  deliberately  humor- 
ous. The  Bill  of  Fare,  on  living  in  a  shortage, 
would  have  been  topical  not  long  ago  had  Tirpitz 
had  his  way.     The  meal  for  twenty  men  consists  of: 

Imprimis  some  Rice  Porredge,  sweet,  and  hot, 
Three  knobs  of  Sugar  season  the  whole  Pot. 
Item,  one  pair  of  Eggs  in  a  great  dish, 
So  ordered  that  they  cover  all  the  Fish. 
230 


William  Cartwright 

Item,  one  gaping  Haddock's  Head,  which  will 
At  least  af right  the  Stomach,  if  not  fill. 
Item,  one  thing  in  Circles,  which  we  take 
Some  for  an  Eele,  but  the  Wiser  for  a  Snake. 

Follows  a  description  of  a  congregation's  mouth 
watering  while  the  preacher  talks  about  the  fatted 
calf  that  was  killed  for  the  Prodigal  Son. 

Mr.  Coffin's  edition  is  a  careful  one,  and  his  pre- 
liminary reading,  although  he  does  not  parade  it,  has 
clearly  been  extensive.  He  gives  variants  and  his 
notes  hit  the  happy  mean  between  inadequacy  and 
superfluity.  One  cannot  but  regret,  however,  that  a 
critical  editor  of  Cartwright  having  turned  up  for 
the  first  time  in  over  250  years  he  did  not  do  the  job 
once  and  for  all  by  covering  the  whole  field.  As 
things  are,  he  has  limited  himself  in  such  a  way  that 
some  one  will  still  have  to  produce  a  complete  edi- 
tion. It  is  not  only  that  he  has  left  out  Cartwright's 
plays,  the  largest  portion  of  his  work.  He  has  also 
— ■  though  one  does  not  know,  of  course,  what  re- 
strictions as  to  space  may  or  may  not  have  been  im- 
posed on  him  —  omitted  the  preliminary  matter  to 
the  1 65 1  edition,  which  is  so  voluminous  and  inter- 
esting that  no  reprint  could  be  really  satisfactory 
which  lacked  it.  The  preface  (in  which  Donne  is 
referred  to  as  "  the  highest  Poet  our  language  can 
boast  of  ")  is  good,  but  it  is  far  outweighed  in  im- 
portance by  the  mass  of  commendatory  poems  which 
follow  it.     I  do  not  think  that  the  collected  edition 

231 


Books  in  General 

of  any  English  writer  is  accompanied  by  tributes  at 
once  so  numerous  and  so  interesting  by  virtue  of  their 
origin.  There  are  about  fifty  of  these  eulogistic  epi- 
taphs; amongst  their  authors  being  "  Orinda," 
Vaughan,  Brome,  Sherburne,  James  Howell,  Izaak 
Walton,  and  Jasper  Mayne,  who  remarks,  inter  alia, 
"  in  thee  Ben  Jonson  still  held  Shakespeare's  quill." 
The  rear  is  brought  up  by  Hum.  Moseley,  the  pub- 
lisher who  modestly  observes: 

/  say  Amen  to  all,  like  a  glad  Cleark 

{For  those  that  cannot  write  may  make  their  Mark) . 

and  then,  getting  to  business,  concludes  with: 

Six  hundred  pages  of  good  Wit?     Read,  try  it; 
Would  all  that  cannot  mend  this  Book  would  buy  it. 

Which  would  make  a  very  good  inscription  for  a 
title-page.  As  an  afterthought  Moseley  (who  had 
almost  a  monopoly  of  verse-publishing  in  his  time) 
adds  a  Postscript : 

"  We  shall  not  trouble  you  with  an  Index,  for  al- 
ready the  Book  is  bigger  than  we  meant  it,  although 
we  chose  this  Volume  and  Character  purposely  to 
bring  down  its  bulk.  The  Printer's  faults  (such  as 
they  are)  must  lye  at  his  own  door;  for  the  written 
Coppy  was  very  exact.  But  (to  save  you  that  la- 
bour) the  next  Page  tells  you  his  Errata." 

This  was  written  before  men  learned  to  sink  their 

personalities  in  their  trades. 

232 


On  Submitting  Manuscripts 

I  WAS  staying  with  a  man  who  was  "  submit- 
ting" (as  they  call  it)  a  manuscript  to  a  paper. 
He  was  not  used  to  this  sort  of  thing,  and  he 
asked  what  he  should  say  to  the  editor  in  the  accom- 
panying note.  A  mere  perfunctory  announcement 
of  the  fact  that  he  was  enclosing  a  manuscript  and 
a  stamped  addressed  envelope  for  its  return  seemed 
to  him  brusque,  uncivil,  inhuman.  I  suggested  that 
what  the  person  at  the  other  end  wanted  to  see  —  if 
he  wanted  to  see  anything  —  was  his  manuscript,  not 
his  letter,  which  would  in  any  case  have  no  bearing 
on  the  merits  of  his  work;  and  that,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  especially  as  there  was  a  paper  shortage,  he 
would  do  best  to  waste  no  notepaper  at  all,  but  to 
send  the  manuscript,  the  stamped  envelope  and  noth- 
ing else.      I  believe  it  was  good  advice. 

In  the  back  of  his  mind,  I  think,  was  the  idea  that 
if  he  wrote  an  obviously  intelligent,  even  sprightly, 
letter,  the  editor  on  whom  he  was  bestowing  his  at- 
tentions would  realize  at  once  that  he  was  dealing 
with  an  unusual  individual  and  read  the  manuscript 
with  double  the  care  which  would  otherwise  have 
been  spent  upon  it.  It  is  a  common  delusion.  I  re- 
member that  when  I  sent  to  a  paper  the  first  of  the 
few  bow-at-a-venture  contributions  I  have  ever  at- 

233 


Books  in  General 

tempted,  I  Informed  the  recipient  that  if  he  did  not 
like  what  I  sent  he  could  throw  it  into  the  fire  — 
where,  possibly,  it  went.  I  suppose  that  I  thought 
that  remark  had  a  certain  panache  about  it;  but  I 
little  knew  how  many  hundreds  of  other  authors  an- 
nually make  the  same  remark.  It  happens  that  since 
then  I  have  at  various  times  seen  a  number  of  letters 
which  both  editors  and  publishers  have  received  with 
manuscript  from  strangers,  and  it  is  odd  how  well- 
defined  are  the  classes  into  which  they  fall. 

Many  of  them  spring  from  an  awkward  feeling 
that  something  must  be  said;  some  from  a  feeling 
that  compliments  may  bring  forth  good  fruit;  some 
perhaps  from  a  suspicion  that  pressure  may  be  ap- 
plied. But  it  is  not,  as  a  rule  (unless  you  know 
your  particular  editor's  weaknesses),  much  use  to 
say,  "  Dear  Sir, —  I  should  be  glad  if  you  would 
print  the  enclosed  verses.  I  may  add  that  I  am  a 
second-cousin  of  the  Duke  of  Dorset."  There  is 
little  point  in  saying,  "  Don't  bother  to  return  this 
if  you  can't  use  it;  it  can  go  into  your  waste-paper 
basket,"  since  hundreds  of  other  people  per  diem  are 
writing  the  same  sort  of  thing;  and  a  similar  objec- 
tion applies  to  statements  that  one  would  rather 
one's  stuff  appeared  in  "  your  admirable  pages  "  than 
in  any  of  the  comparatively  inferior  pages  of  the 
paper's  contemporaries. 

One  class  of  these  covering  letters  was  discussed 
by  Thackeray  in  his  Roundabout  Papers.     He  was 

234 


On  Submitting  Manuscripts 

editing  the  Cornhill,  and  he  found  that  his  bed  was 
strewn  with  thorns.  His  lot  was  worse  than  most; 
for  he  was  so  well  known  that  piles  of  MSS.  used  to 
be  addressed  to  his  private  residence,  although  he 
advertised  in  his  magazine  that  contributions  should 
only  be  sent  to  Messrs.  Smith,  Elder  &  Co.  He  re- 
printed one  of  the  numerous  appeals  ad  misencor- 
diam  which  he  said  he  had  received.  It  ran  as  fol- 
lows: 

"  Camberwell,  June  4. 
"  Sir, —  May  I  hope,  may  I  entreat,  that  you  will 
favour  me  by  perusing  the  enclosed  lines,  and  that 
they  may  be  found  worthy  of  insertion  in  the  Corn- 
hill  Magazine?  We  have  known  better  days,  sir. 
I  have  a  sick  and  widowed  mother  to  maintain,  and 
little  brothers  and  sisters  who  look  to  me.  I  do  my 
utmost  as  a  governess  to  support  them.  I  toil  at 
night  when  they  are  at  rest,  and  my  own  hand  and 
brain  are  alike  tired.  If  I  could  add  but  a  little  to 
our  means  by  my  pen,  many  of  my  poor  invalid's 
wants  might  be  supplied,  and  I  could  procure  for  her 
comforts  to  which  she  is  now  a  stranger.  Heaven 
knows  it  is  not  for  want  of  will  or  for  want  of  energy 
on  my  part  that  she  is  now  in  ill-health,  and  our  little 
household  almost  without  bread.  Do  —  do  cast  a 
kind  glance  over  my  poem,  and  if  you  can  help  us, 
the  widow,  the  orphans  will  bless  you!  —  I  remain, 
Sir,  in  anxious  expectancy,  your  faithful  servant, 

"S.   S.   S." 

I  do  not  suppose  that  Thackeray  actually  did  receive 

235 


Books  in  General 

this  letter;  he  would  scarcely  have  had  the  bad  taste 
to  reprint  it  if  it  had  been  genuine.  More  prob- 
ably it  was  the  common  measure  of  a  large  number 
of  similar  ones.  It  hurt  him,  he  said,  to  have  these 
people  "  calling  for  bread  which  I  can  give  them  if  I 
choose,"  when  he  knew  that  he  could  only  "  choose  " 
by  betraying  his  editorial  trust  and  printing  unsuit- 
able literature. 

Covering  letters  to  publishers  must,  I  suppose, 
usually  be  written.  There  are  so  many  things  to  be 
stated:  willingness  or  unwillingness  to  cut,  desire  to 
have  MSS.  back  in  two  weeks  if  not  acceptable,  and 
so  on.  There  is  also,  in  many  cases,  something  to 
be  said  about  finance.  The  chastest  example  of  this 
that  I  can  remember  was  thel  letter  that  Shelley, 
when  at  school,  wrote  to  Messrs.  Longmans  concern- 
ing his  first  novel.  It  is  to  be  presumed  that  he 
wanted  to  suggest  that  he  was  ready,  if  necessary,  to 
pay  for  its  publication,  and  that  pride,  or  an  unchar- 
acteristic caution,  prevented  him  from  saying  so  in 
terms.  This  was  the  letter  that  left  Royal  Henry's 
shades: 

"Eton  College,  May  7,   1809. 
"  Gentlemen, 

"  It  is  my  intention  to  complete  and  publish  a 
Romance,  of  which  I  have  already  written  a  large 
portion,  before  the  end  of  July.  My  object  in  writ- 
ing it  was  not  pecuniary,  as  I  am  independent,  being 
the  heir  of  a  gentleman  of  large  fortune  in  the  county 
236 


On  Submitting  Manuscripts 

of  Sussex,  and  prosecuting  my  studies  as  an  Oppidan 
at  Eton;  from  the  many  leisure  hours  I  have,  I  have 
taken  an  opportunity  of  indulging  my  favourite  pro- 
pensity in  writing.  Should  it  produce  any  pecimiary 
advantages,  so  much  the  better  for  me,  I  do  not  ex- 
pect it.  If  you  would  be  so  kind  as  to  answer  this, 
direct  it  to  me  at  the  Rev.  George  Bethell's.  Might 
I  likewise  request  the  favour  of  secrecy  until  the 
Romance  is  published, 
"lam 

"  Your  very  humble  servant, 

"  Percy  Shelley." 

"  Be  so  good  as  to  tell  me  whether  I  shall  send 
you  the  original  manuscript  when  I  have  completed 
it  or  one  corrected,  etc." 

Messrs.  Longmans  observed  that  they  would  "  be 
happy  to  see  the  MS."  But  they  did  not  publish  it, 
and  the  "  pecuniary  advantages  "  certainly  were  not 
"  produced." 


237 


Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Lord 
Tennyson 

I  HAVE  been  reading  Mr.  Wells's  book  The 
Undying  Fire,  and  I  certainly  agree  with  those 
who  call  it  the  best  book  he  has  written  since 
his  early  scientific  romances  and  A  Modern  Utopia. 
But  when  I  was  reading  it  something  kept  on  whis- 
pering "  Where  have  I  recently  gone  through  all  this 
argument  somewhere  else?"  I  then  remembered 
that  a  few  months  ago  I  had  returned  to  that  great, 
if  uneven,  poem  In  Memoriam;  and  it  was  at  once 
plain  that,  though  it  may  not  be  possible  to  call  Mr. 
Wells  the  Lord  Tennyson  of  this  age,  Tennyson  in 
that  poem  had  conducted  almost  exactly  the  same 
argument  as  Mr.  Wells  in  almost  exactly  the  same 
way.     Let  me  make  a  few  extracts. 

The  most  passionate  and  eloquent  parts  of  Mr. 
Huss's  discourse  are  those  in  which  he  describes  the 
blankness  of  a  godless  universe  and  the  horrible 
cruelties  of  Nature  "  red  in  tooth  and  claw." 
"  What  was  most  in  my  thoughts  on  that  day  when 
the  world  of  Nature  showed  its  teeth  to  me  was  the 
wretchedness  of  animal  life  "  : 

"  It  was  as  if  the  universe  had  put  aside  a  mask  it 
238 


Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Lord  Tennyson 

had  hitherto  worn,  and  shown  me  its  face,  and  it  was 
a  face  of  boundless  evil.  ...  It  was  as  if  a  power 
of  darkness  sat  over  me  and  watched  me  with  a 
mocking  gaze,  and  for  the  rest  of  that  day  I  could 
think  of  nothing  but  the  feeble  miseries  of  living 
things.  I  was  tortured,  and  all  life  was  tortured 
with  me." 

Tennyson's  passages  on  evolution  need  no  quoting. 
If,  he  said,  man's  place  in  Nature  was  what  it  seemed 
in  these  words,  if  he 

Who  roll'd  the  psalm  to  empty  skies, 
PFho  built  him  fanes  of  fruitless  prayer 

is  to  end  in  ineffective  dust,  he  is : 

A  monster  then,  a  dream, 
A  discord.     Dragons  of  the  prime, 
That  tear  each  other  in  the  slime. 
Were  mellow  music  match'd  with  him. 

Or,  as  Mr.  Wells  puts  it: 

"  If  right  and  wrong  are  to  perish  together  indif- 
ferently, if  there  is  aimless  and  fruitless  suffering,  if 
there  opens  no  hope  for  an  eternal  survival  in  conse- 
quences of  all  good  things,  then  there  is  no  meaning 
in  such  a  belief  in  Christianity." 

We  notice  here  a  slight  difference.     Mr.  Wells  un- 

239 


Books  in  General 

obtrusively  slips  in  that  "  in  consequences,"  presum- 
ably to  shelve  what  to  Tennyson  was  "  the  larger 
hope  "  of  personal  immortality.  But  the  vision  is 
the  same  and  the  reaction  much  the  same.  Mr. 
Huss  (facing  the  spectres  of  the  mind,  as  Tenny- 
son put  it)  feels  at  moments  that 

'Twere  best  at  once  to  sink  to  peace, 

Like  birds  the  charming  serpent  draws, 
To  drop  head  foremost  in  the  jaws 

Of  vacant  darkness  and  to  cease. 

To  the  brooding  mind  of  Mr.  Huss  it  seems  that 
perhaps  we  have  made  a  god  in  our  own  image,  and 
that 

"  where  we  had  thought  a  God,  somehow  akin 
to  ourselves,  ruled  in  the  universe,  it  may  be  there  is 
nothing  but  black  emptiness  and  a  coldness  worse 
than  cruelty." 

That  horrible  doubt  appears  early  in  In  Memoriam: 

"  The  stars,"  she  whispers,  "  blindly  run; 

A  web  is  wov'n  across  the  sky; 

From  out  waste  places  comes  a  cry, 
And  murmurs  from  the  dying  sun: 

"  And  all  the  phantom,  Nature,  stands  — 
With  the  music  in  her  tone, 
A  hollow  echo  of  my  own, 
A  hollow  form  with  empty  hands" 
240 


Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Lord  Tennyson 

The  animate  world  is  a  shambles;  all  things  pass. 
The  diagnosis  and  the  treatment  are  similar;  we  even 
find  that  both  Tennyson  and  Mr.  Wells,  imaginative 
men,  when  surveying  the  processes  of  evolution,  are 
struck  by  the  splendour  and  pride  and  pitiful  tran- 
sience of  those  larger  monsters  which  preceded  man. 
In  two  of  the  most  eloquent  of  his  pages  Mr.  Wells 
admires  the  magnificence  of  "  Behemoth  in  a  thou- 
sand forms,  Demotherium,  Titanotherium,  Hellado- 
therium,"  creatures  which  were  in  some  regards  finer 
and  more  powerful  than  we,  but  which  have  never- 
theless passed,  "  and  we  wax  in  our  turn.  .  .  .  How 
can  we  at  last  escape  the  common  fate?  "  Tenny- 
son —  in  a  sort  of  overflow  passage  embodied  in 
Maude  —  was  arrested  by  a  similar  thought : 

A  monstrous  eft  was  of  old  the  Lord  and  Master  of 
Earth; 

For  him  did  his  high  sun  flame,  and  his  river  billow- 
ing ran, 

And  he  felt  himself  in  his  force  to  be  Nature's  crown- 
ing race. 

As  nine  months  go  to  the  shaping  an  infant  ripe  for 
his    birth, 

So  many  a  million  ages  have  gone  to  the  making  of 
man. 

He  now  is  first.  But  is  he  the  last?  Is  he  not  too 
base? 

But  there  comes  an  escape  from  these  self-tortur- 
ings ;  and  the  escape  is  the  same  to  both. 

241 


Books  in  General 

Mr.  Wells,  or  rather  his  Mr.  Huss,  confronted 
with  the  horrors  of  Nature,  says: 

"  If  there  is  no  God,  no  mercy,  no  human  kindness 
in  the  great  frame  of  space  and  time,  if  life  is  a  writh- 
ing torment,  an  itch  upon  one  little  planet,  and  the 
stars  away  there  in  the  void  no  more  than  huge 
empty  flares,  signifying  nothing,  then  all  the  brighter 
shines  the  God  in  my  heart." 

To  Tennyson,  too,  at  moments  Time  seemed 

a  maniac  scattering  dust 
And  Life,  a  Fury  slinging  flame. 

But,  amplifying,  he  falls  back  on  the  same  fountain 
of  courage: 

/  found  him  not  in  world  or  sun, 
Or  eagle's  wing,  or  insect's  eye; 
Nor  thro'  the  questions  men  may  try, 

The  petty  cobwebs  we  have  spun. 

If  e'er  when  faith  had  fallen  asleep 
I  heard  a  voice  "  Believe  no  more  " 
And  heard  an  ever-breaking  shore 

That  tumbled  in  the  godless  deep; 

A  warmth  within  the  breast  would  melt 
The  freezing  reason's  colder  part, 
And  like  a  man  in  wrath  the  heart 
Stood  up  and  answer' d  '^  I  have  felt." 
242 


Mr.  H.  G.  Wells  and  Lord  Tennyson 

And  starting  from  that  firm  basis  both  Mr.  Wells 
and  Tennyson  find  that  they  have  discovered  a  start- 
ing-point for  regenerative  effort. 

The  end  of  our  struggle  here,  concludes  Mr. 
Wells,  is  to  remould  surely  in  the  light  of  service,  "  to 
draw  all  men  together  out  of  themselves  into  one 
common  life  and  effort  with  God."  Only  through 
the  will  of  men  can  the  race  greater  than  man  come. 
The  lesson  of  the  war  should  be  that  men,  inspired 
by  the  Divine  courage,  should  say:  "This  and  all 
such  things  must  end."  "  Social  truth  shall  spread," 
cried  the  voice  of  Tennyson's  comforter,  Love;  he 
saw  In  all  things  "toil  co-operant  to  an  end";  he 
watched  Titanic  maidens  who  stood : 

As  one  would  sing  the  death  of  war 
And  one  would  chant  the  history 
Of  that  great  race,  which  is  to  be. 

And  though  Tennyson's  theology  does  not  separate 
"  the  God  in  the  Heart  "  from  all  without,  and 
though  superficially  he  appears  to  regard  the  desired 
processes  as  automatic,  I  don't  th'nk  that  at  bottom 
he  is  any  more  complacent  or  less  encouraging  than 
Mr.  Wells. 


243 


The  Statistics  of  Genius 

SOME  years  ago  Mr.  Havelock  Ellis  published 
a  Study  of  British  Genius,  in  which  he  inves- 
tigated the  ancestry  and  characteristics  of 
eminent  men  born  in  these  islands.  I  cannot  at  the 
moment  recall  —  but  there  is  no  necessity  —  any  of 
the  conclusions  at  which  he  arrived,  save  only  that 
he  stated  that  my  own  country  was  very  prolific  in 
geniuses  and  that  its  products  were  of  a  uniquely 
brilliant,  adventurous  and  fascinating  type.  In- 
spired, apparently,  by  his  example  and  by  that  of 
Monsieur  Odin,  who  has  made  a  similar  study  of 
eminent  Frenchmen,  Professor  Edwin  Leavitt  Clarke 
has  now  written  a  book,  American  Men  of  Letters: 
Their  Nature  and  Nurture,  which  appears  as  No.  i, 
Vol.  LXXII.,  of  the  Columbia  University  Studies  in 
History,  Economics  and  Public  Law. 

Professor  Clarke  (who  dedicates  his  book  "  to  my 
Father  and  Mother,  to  whom  I  owe  the  Nature  and 
Nurture  which  made  this  Study  possible  ")  takes  the 
thousand  leading  American  men  of  letters  born  in 
or  before  1850  and  subjects  them  to  a  very  elaborate 
scrutiny.  He  is  less  fortunate  than  Mr.  Ellis  and 
Professor  Odin  in  having  to  draw  his  materials  from 
a  brief  period  of  time  and  a  community  which  has 
244 


The  Statistics  of  Genius 

thus  far  been  relatively  infertile  of  first-class  men. 
He  had  to  have  a  large  number  for  the  sake  of  his 
statistics,  but  many  of  them  must  be  very  small  fry. 
Of  the  whole  looo  names  only  91  are  known  to  me 
(an  intelligent  foreigner),  including  those  of  Mrs. 
Eddy,  W.  L.  Moody  and  Ira  D.  Sankey,  and  others 
of  the  sort,  besides  names  like  H.  Timrod  and  Jones 
Very,  casual  mentions  of  which  have  stuck  in  my 
memory  merely  because  they  are  odd.  But  they  ap- 
pear to  have  been  selected  on  sound  principles;  they 
are  the  thousand  best  obtainable ;  and  Professor 
Clarke's  numerous  tables  with  regard  to  their  origin, 
upbringing,  connubial  state  and  so  on  are  as  careful 
and  exhaustive  as  the  lay  reader  could  wish  them 
to  be. 

The  thousand  includes  a  certain  number  of  libra- 
rians, erudite  men,  actors,  orators,  publicists,  popu- 
larizers,  bibliophiles  and  patrons  {e.g.,  Pierpont 
Morgan),  besides  the  more  numerous  writers  of  his- 
tory, novels,  essays  and  poems.  Nine  "  important 
environmental  conditions  "  are  considered.  These 
are:  "  (i)  Social  environment,  by  which  is  meant 
the  ideals  and  customs  of  a  group  at  any  given  time 
and  place;  (2)  geographic  environment;  (3)  local 
environment;  (4)  education;  (5)  economic  condition 
of  parents;  (6)  occupation  of  father;  (7)  occupa- 
tion of  the  literati  themselves;  (8)  early  religious 
training;  and  (9)  birth-rank  in  the  family  of  broth- 
ers and  sisters."  The  investigation  of  these  "  forces 
of  nurture  "  leads  to  the  production  of  many  Interest- 

245 


Books  in  General 

Ing,  if  few  surprising,  facts.  American  literary 
fecundity  (the  datea  are  birth-dates)  was  at  its 
highest  in  the  decade  1791-1800,  which  produced 
"  twenty-three  authors  per  miUion."  The  rate  was 
"practically  constant"  for  twenty  years  more;  fell 
off  by  40  per  cent,  in  1 821— '30,  and  thereafter  stead- 
ily declined.  Professor  Clarke  divides  his  people 
into  "  men  of  talent  "  (higher  class)  and  "  men  of 
merit,"  and  says  that  the  proportion  of  the  former  to 
the  latter  has  declined.  The  influences  which  have 
militated  against  authorship  have  apparently  most 
strongly  affected  men  of  exceptional  ability;  perhaps 
the  "  men  of  superior  ability  were  the  first  to  sense 
the  baneful  influence  of  approaching  philistinism." 
The  proportion  of  literary  women  has  increased;  in 
itself,  as  the  Professor  observes,  a  tribute  to  the 
power  of  environmental  conditions.  In  all  but  one 
of  the  departments  of  literary  activity  New  England 
produced  more  literati,  in  proportion  to  population, 
than  any  other  group  of  States.  The  one  exception 
was  the  drama ;  and  here  the  Puritan  influence  may  be 
traced.  "  As  a  whole,  authors  appeared  most  fre- 
quently, and  showed  the  greatest  skill  and  versatility, 
when  their  contemporaries  were  in  sympathy  with 
their  work."  The  importance  of  the  Southern 
States  was  slight. 

It  was  found,  in  respect  of  education,  that  50.6  per 
cent,  of  all  the  persons  catalogued  had  received  a  full 
college  course.  The  proportion  is  even  higher  than 
one  would  have  thought  likely;  and  though  it  de- 
clined, it  did  not  decline  largely.  The  professional 
246 


The  Statistics  of  Genius 

classes,  especially  clergyman  and  lawyers,  produced 
many  times  their  proportionate  number  of  literary 
persons,  "  The  class  of  mechanics,  clerks  and  la- 
bourers produced  relatively  very  few  men  of  letters." 
"  If  relative  numbers  are  considered,  the  Unitarian 
body  apparently  had  the  greatest  proportion  of  lit- 
erary persons  born  within  its  ranks,  and  the  Congre- 
gationalists.  Friends  and  Universalists  followed  in 
order."  First-born  children  are  rather  more  fre- 
quently literary,  in  almost  every  size  of  family,  than 
would  have  seemed  probable.  So,  also,  were  last- 
born  children.  And  explanations  suggest  themselves 
for  this.  As  to  "  nationality  strain  "  no  fewer  than 
93.8  per  cent,  of  the  1000  were  British  and  1,4  Irish. 
This  proportion  is  fairly  representative  of  the  esti- 
mated proportion  in  the  whole  population  up  to  1840 
or  so. 

Professor  Clarke's  conclusion  is  explained  in  a 
comprehensible  if  scarcely  audacious  simile.  Nature 
is  likened  to  seed  and  nurture  to  ground:  — 

"  A  combination  of  either  good  ground  and  poor 
seed  or  poor  ground  and  good  seed  will  produce  a 
better  crop  than  when  poor  seed  is  sown  on  poor 
ground.  No  good  crop  is  ever  produced,  however, 
without  the  use  of  both  good  seed  and  good  ground. 
In  like  manner  gifted  children  who  lack  opportunity, 
and  dull  children  who  possess  every  opportunity, 
achieve  far  more  than  dull  children  who  lack  favour- 
able conditions  of  environment." 

247 


Books  in  General 

Galton  and  L.  F.  Ward  were  both  right  in  insisting 
respectively  on  breeding  and  nurture,  and  "  the  so- 
ciologist is  justified  in  advocating,  with  all  the  force 
at  his  command,  the  extension  of  those  fundamental 
American  privileges,  economic  and  social  opportunity 
and  education,  by  means  of  which  all  the  innate  abil- 
ity which  exists  may  be  given  the  environment  neces- 
sary for  its  maximum  development."  It  is  extraor- 
dinary —  or  rather,  it  is  not  extraordinary  —  how 
often  statistical  inquiries  confirm  the  conclusions  of 
common  observation  and  reasoning.  I  remember 
seeing  hefty  great  tables  which  proved  conclusively 
that  slum  children  are  not  so  tall  and  heavy  as  public- 
school  boys.  But  such  tables  are  very  useful  as 
against  people  who  can  be  convinced  by  no  other 
means. 

It  may  be  added  that  Professor  Clarke  says  little 
about  the  production  of  the  highest  forms  of  genius. 
He  quotes  with  approval  some  one  who  says  that 
great  genius  is  the  perfect  fruit  from  a  twig  which 
has  grown  in  perfect  conditions.  He  allows  it  to  be 
deduced  from  scattered  sentences  that  he  does  not 
expect  much  great  genius  from  America  in  its  present 
transitional  chaos.  If  not  a  settled  order,  at  least  a 
strong  and  coherent  body  of  doctrine  or  a  powerful 
wave  of  emotion  infecting  the  community  or  a  com- 
pact part  of  it  is,  he  appears  to  suggest,  wanted. 
But  this  is  a  more  academic  matter.  We  may  be 
able  to  give  people  better  food  and  education,  but  we 
are  not  yet  equipped  with  efficient  schemes  for  pro- 
248 


The  Statistics  of  Genius 

ducing  religious  unanimity  or  intense  spiritual  atmos- 
pheres. Some  part  of  man's  environment  will 
always  escape  our  deliberate  regularization.  We 
ought  not  to  be  sorry. 


249 


Coleridge  at  Table 


WHEN  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  produced  a 
volume  of  caricatures  entitled  The  Poet's 
Corner,  he  thought  he  could  best  repre- 
sent Coleridge  by  showing  him  laying  down  the  law 
at  an  originally  festive  board,  his  rapt  eyes  shining 
upwards,  obHvious  of  the  fact  that  his  companions 
are  all  snoring  hard,  with  their  mouths  open  and 
their  cheeks  on  each  other's  shoulders.  Coleridge's 
proclivities  as  a  talker  are,  of  course,  notorious;  ev- 
erybody has  heard  of  the  dialogue  between  him  and 
Lamb :  "  I  think,  Charles,  that  you  never  heard 
me  preach,"  "  My  dear  boy,  I  never  heard  you  do 
anything  else."  The  fact  that  his  Table  Talk  — 
which  was  first  published  in  1835  ^Y  ^^^  nephew, 
Henry  Nelson  Coleridge  —  has  not  been  very  widely 
read  in  this  generation  may  be  due  to  a  misapprehen- 
sion of  these  stories.  For  Coleridge,  though  he 
often  talked  boringly  and  incomprehensibly,  usually 
talked  far  too  long,  and  invariably  monopolized 
what  only  a  fantastic  courtesy  could  call  a  conversa- 
tion, was  at  his  best  one  of  the  best  talkers  on  record. 

The  last  reprint  of  the  Table  Talk  with  which  I 
am  acquainted  is  that  (1884)  in  Henry  Morley's 
Universal  Library,  a  most  interesting  series  much 
250 


Coleridge  at  Table 

handicapped  by  the  criminal  smallness  of  its  print. 
A  new  edition  has  been  pubHshed  by  the  Oxford  Uni- 
versity Press.  It  includes,  as  Morley's  reprint  did 
not  include,  Coleridge's  Omniana  (contributed  to  an 
1 8 12  volume  of  Southey's)  and  supplementary  Table 
Talk  from  Alsop's  Recollections  of  1836,  By  way 
of  preface  there  appears  H.  N,  C.'s  original  introduc- 
tion and  a  paper  written  in  1886  for  the  St.  James' 
Gazette  by  Coventry  Patmore.  Patmore  remarks 
that  Coleridge's  table  talk  was  his  best  prose  work; 
the  finest  thoughts  in  his  books  "  shine  only  as  the 
more  lustrous  points  of  luminous  nebulas,  in  his  re- 
corded conversations  glitter  as  brightly  and  distinctly 
as  stars  in  a  frosty  night."  Patmore's  quotations 
are  mostly  political  quotations  selected  because  they 
fortified  his  own  convictions,  e.^.: 

"  I  have  never  known  a  trader  in  philanthropy  who 
was  not  wrong  in  heart  somewhere  or  other.  Indi- 
viduals so  distinguished  are  usually  unhappy  In  their 
family  relations  —  men  not  benevolent  or  beneficent 
to  individuals,  but  almost  hostile  to  them,  yet  lavish- 
ing money  and  labour  and  time  on  the  race,  the  ab- 
stract notion.  The  cosmopolitism  which  does  not 
spring  out  of,  and  blossom  upon,  the  deep-rooted 
stem  of  nationality  or  patriotism,  Is  a  spurious  and 
rotten  growth." 

The  first  part  of  this  Is  rather  too  sweeping  a  gen- 
eralization, but  the  truth  about  almost  all  politicians 
in  all  ages  reposes  in  another: 

251 


Books  In  General 

"  See  how  triumphant  in  debate  and  in  action 
O'Connell  is!  Why?  Because  he  asserts  a  broad 
principle,  and  acts  up  to  it,  rests  all  his  body  on  it, 
and  has  faith  in  it.  Our  ministers  —  true  Whigs  in 
that  —  have  faith  in  nothing  but  expedients  de  die 
in  diem." 

But  it  is  misleading  to  fasten  particularly  on  his 
political  remarks,  for  almost  every  subject  in  this 
world  and  the  other  was  canvassed  by  him  and  he 
had  an  amazing  faculty  for  linking  up  subjects  not 
commonly  associated  and  drawing  illustrations  from 
the  most  surprising  sources. 

I  may  give  a  few  examples  of  some  of  the  kinds  of 
things  he  said: 

"  A  rogue  is  a  roundabout  fool. 

"  Our  theatres  —  Drury  Lane  and  Covent  Gar- 
den—  are  fit  for  nothing:  they  are  too  large  for 
acting,  and  too  small  for  a  bull-fight. 

"  The  Reformation  in  the  sixteenth  century  nar- 
rowed Reform.  As  soon  as  men  began  to  call  them- 
selves names,  all  hope  of  further  amendment  was 
lost. 

"  The  best  way  to  bring  a  clever  young  man  who 
has  become  sceptical  and  unsettled  to  reason,  is  to 
make  him  feel  something  in  any  way.  Love,  if  sin- 
cere and  unworldly,  will,  in  nine  cases  out  of  ten, 
bring  him  to  a  sense  and  assurance  of  something  real 
and  actual;  and  that  sense  alone  will  make  him  think 
252 


Coleridge  at  Table 

to  a  sound  purpose,  instead  of  dreaming  that  he  is 
thinking." 

There  are  hundreds  of  Coleridge's  acutest  literary 
judgments  in  these  pages;  and  in  few,  I  think,  would 
the  common  sense  of  posterity  differ  from  him. 
There  are  also  some  excellent  light  poems  (including 
two  on  the  bad  smells  of  Cologne)  and  many  anec- 
dotes. I  would  recommend  this  book  to  any  one 
who  is  not  too  lazy  to  think,  but  likes  to  do  his  think- 
ing without  systematic  solemnity. 


253 


Fragments  of  China 

A  CORRESPONDENT  in  China,  noting  a  ref- 
erence I  made  to  School  Magazines,  sends 
me  some  numbers  of  The  Yellow  Dragon, 
the  magazine  of  Queen's  College,  Elongkong. 
Most  of  the  boys  appear  to  be  Chinese,  and  East 
meets  West  pretty  intimately  in  the  school  chronicles. 
The  form  is  the  usual  form;  there  is  a  Latin  poem, 
there  are  accounts  of  football  matches  and  a  chess 
tournament;  but  after  much  that  is  familiar  one  sud- 
denly comes  across  the  announcement  that  the  Head- 
master has  received  the  following  letter  from  a  gen- 
tleman apologizing  for  the  absence  of  two  boys  from 
school: 

"  Dear  Sir, —  Having  instantly  received  the  awful 
tidings  that  Cheuk  Yuk  Ling,  in  class  Full  3  A  and 
Cheuk  Yuk  Tat,  in  class  7,  have  been  both  kidnapped 
by  thieves  when  visiting  their  ancestors'  tombs,  I  beg 
you  to  kindly  grant  them  a  few  days  of  absence  as 
they  will  be  ransomed  in  a  short  time.  As  soon  as 
they  are  freed  they  will  attend  to  school." 

Curiously,  another  correspondent  in  China  sends  me 
almost  simultaneously  two  cuttings  from  the  Central 
China  Post.  One  of  them  is  a  notice  which  could 
have  appeared  nowhere  in  the  world  but  in  that  suav- 
est  of  countries: 
254 


Fragments  of  China 
"  To  Carpet  Buyers." 

"  Mr.  Tien  Chun-chien  of  the  Tien  Chang  Carpet 
Company,  No.  36  San  Teh  Li,  French  Concession, 
begs  to  request  his  patrons  to  call  before  nine  in  the 
morning  or  after  half-past  four  in  the  afternoon 
when  he  will  have  the  pleasure  of  attending  to  them 
personally,  as  he  fears  that  they  may  be  overcharged 
by  his  assistants." 

But  the  other  is,  unhappily,  merely  an  Oriental 
version  of  a  universal  tragic  story.  It  is  a  letter  to 
the  Editor:  it  is  headed  "  Yangtze  Scenery  and  Jap- 
anese Advertisements  ";  and  it  is  one  more  proof  of 
the  readiness  of  the  Japanese  to  imitate  the  worst 
features  of  our  commercial  civilization.     It  runs: 

"  Honourable  Mister, —  My  friend  have  tell 
me  just  now  you  like  that  Japan  pill  notices  in  hills  of 
Ichang.  Any  man  can  understand  that  pill  notice 
in  hills  most  highest  unreason,  certainly  for  cause 
that  pills  very  perhaps  wholesome  I  don't  know  for 
bloods  and  other  internal  juices  of  the  interior  body. 
Pill  notice  in  hill  very  much  confounded,  walking  men 
(and  otherwise  women)  travelling  in  hills  so  can 
perspect  the  views.  More  proper  can  put  Japan  pill 
notice  in  bath  rooms  I  think  so  very  much.  With 
you  much  kindness  —  Yours  very  friendly, 

"  P.  Z.  TONG. 

"  Wuchang,  Aug.  31st." 

My  heart  bleeds  for  Ichang. 

255 


Rupert  Brooke  in  Retrospect 

IN  Rugby  School  Chapel  there  are  tablets  com- 
memorating Matthew  Arnold  and  Clough. 
There  might  also  have  been  one  to  Landor. 
But  Landor  was  expelled  at  an  early  age  as  an  incor- 
rigible. An  incorrigible  he  was.  He  was  after- 
wards sent  down  from  Oxford  for  firing  a  gun  into 
the  rooms  of  a  Tory  undergraduate,  which  offence 
was  made  worse  (it  is  said)  because  he  refused  to 
give  an  explanation.  The  mere  fact  that  an  institu- 
tion has  ejected  a  great  man  does  not  always  prevent 
it  from  claiming  credit  for  helping  to  shape  him. 
Shelley  was  turned  out  of  University  College,  Ox- 
ford, for  firing  a  controversial  blunderbuss  (he  at 
least  would  have  been  prepared  to  explain  and  de- 
fend his  action  indefinitely),  but  there  is  a  vast  me- 
morial to  him  there :  a  creepy  great  marble  model  of 
his  naked  corpse  lying  under  a  hollow  ceiling  painted 
dark  blue  with  stars  on  it,  and  intended  (the  visitor 
conceives)  to  represent  the  sky.  Rugby  has  been 
more  reserved.  She  has  foregone  Landor,  but  to 
Arnold  and  Clough  she  has  now  added  Rupert 
Brooke,  a  tablet  to  whom  was  unveiled  on  March 
29,  19 19,  by  Sir  Ian  Hamilton. 

Sir  lan's  address  was  delivered  under  difficult  con- 
ditions: in  the  chapel,  where  an  audience  is  precluded 
256 


Rupert  Brooke  in  Retrospect 

from  making  those  signs  of  approval,  and  even  dis- 
approval, which,  by  filling  up  a  speaker's  pauses,  help 
him  to  keep  going.  But  its  clarity  and  directness, 
and  the  happy  choice  of  its  words,  impressed  one 
when  one  heard  it,  and  in  print  it  seemed  still  better. 
Sir  Ian  suggested  that  Brooke's  personality  was  even 
more  remarkable  than  his  work,  which  he  had  hardly 
begun.  Brooke  will  be  a  legendary  figure ;  when  our 
generation  has  been  long  dead  his  personality  will 
fascinate  posterity;  they  will  magnify  him;  a  myth 
will  gather  around  him;  he  will  be  one  of  those 
figures  around  whom  creative  literature  is  written. 
I  think  that  is  true ;  he  was  one  of  those  men  of  whom 
one  feels  that  accidents  do  not  happen;  that  their 
personalities,  without  effort,  compel  their  careers; 
men  to  whom  "  romantic  "  lives  and  deaths  seem  to 
come  as  naturally  as  its  predestined  passage  to  a 
flower.  I  thought  of  this  as  I  was  coming  home,  but 
when  I  got  home  I  turned  back  to  his  work  to  see 
how  I  now  found  it. 

I  found  it  better  than  before,  and  especially  the 
latest  of  it.  In  his  lifetime  and  after  his  death  too 
much  attention,  relatively,  was  given  to  the  extrava- 
gances, the  mild  extravagances,  of  his  youth.  A 
great  number  of  the  poems  in  his  first  book  were  half- 
serious,  over-emphasized  exercises  on  themes  chosen 
(however  unconsciously)  because  they  would  annoy 
sentimentalists.  Laughing  audacities  akin  to  these 
are  to  be  found  in  the  book  on  Webster.  But  It  Is  a 
mistake  to  telescope  a  man's  work;  and  It  Is  especially 

257 


Books  in  General 

so  when  dealing  with  a  man  who  bridged  the  gulf  be- 
tween precocity  and  maturity  in  a  very  few  years  and 
then  died.  Even  in  Brooke's  earliest  work,  few 
though  were  the  poems  in  his  first  book  that  would 
have  lasted  on  their  own  merits,  there  was  evident  a 
technical  mastery,  which  seldom  failed,  over  the 
handling  of  verse,  and  the  promise  of  an  extraordi- 
narily clear  and  straightforward  style.  If  one  puts 
these  behind  one  and  considers  only  the  work  of  his 
last  two  or  three  years,  one  finds  that  style  in  full 
bloom,  unstained  by  forced  words  or  tricks  of  expres- 
sion. No  modern  man  has  written  prose  more  clear 
and  charming  than  is  to  be  found  in  the  letters  from 
America  or  the  confession  on  the  outbreak  of  war, 
a  prose  which  most  easily  adapted  itself  both  to 
the  lightest  raillery  or  irony  and  to  the  profoundest 
feelings  of  the  heart,  contemplating  the  universe  and 
death.     And  his  verse  was  the  twin  of  his  prose. 

Time  would  have  brought  a  fuller  content;  and, 
automatically,  that  larger  volume  of  production 
which  makes  a  man's  powers  so  much  more  evident 
and  definable.  But  any  one  who  freshly  reads  his 
last  work  must,  I  think,  agree  that,  emotionally  and 
intellectually,  Brooke  had  already  found  himself;  and 
that  he  had  actually  perfected  his  instrument.  His 
war-sonnets  have  been  so  quoted  and  requoted  that, 
for  the  time  being,  the  ear  is  dulled  to  them;  but  they 
were  not  all  he  had  done  in  the  sonnet  form,  and  had 
he  never  written  them,  the  others,  for  number  and 
quality,  exceed  anything  in  the  kind  that  any  of  his 
258 


Rupert  Brooke  in  Retrospect 

contemporaries  had  done.  I  think  the  most  beauti- 
ful is  The  Busy  Heart;  but  how  good  are  all  those 
sonnets  written  in  the  Pacific  I  How  easily,  yet 
gravely,  they  progress  to  an  inevitable  end!  Take 
the(  endings  of  them  together  and  how  well  they 
stand: 

And  I  recall,  lose,  grasp,  forget  again. 

And  still  remember,  a  tale  I  have  heard,  or  known; 
An  empty  tale,  of  idleness  and  pain, 

Of  two  that  loved  —  or  did  not  love  —  and  one 
Whose  perplexed  heart  did  evil,  foolishly 
A  long  while  since  and  by  some  other  sea. 

So  a  poor  ghost,  beside  his  misty  streams, 
Is  haunted  by  strange  doubts,  evasive  dreams. 

Hints  of  a  pre-Lethean  life,  of  men. 
Stars,  rocks,  and  flesh,  things  unintelligible; 

And  light  on  waving  grass,  he  knows  not  when. 
And  feet  that  ran,  but  where,  he  cannot  tell. 

Spend  in  pure  converse  our  eternal  day ; 

Think  each  in  each,  immediately  wise; 
Learn  all  we  lacked  before ;  hear,  know,  and  say 

What  this  tumultuous  body  now  denies; 
And  feel,  who  have  laid  our  groping  hands  away; 

And  see,  no  longer  blinded  by  our  eyes. 

They  say  that  the  Dead  die  not,  but  remain 

Near  to  the  rich  heirs  of  their  grief  and  mirth. 
I  think  they  ride  the  calm  mid-heaven,  as  these, 

259 


Books  in  General 

In  wise,  majestic,  melancholy  train, 
And  watch  the  moon,  and  the  still-raging  seas 
And  men,  coming  and  going  on  the  earth. 

In  each  of  these  cases  the  last  line  Is  perfect  and 
detachable;  yet  it  is  patent  that  in  none  has  the  poet 
"  written  up  to  "  the  last  line;  it  grows  naturally  out 
of  what  comes  before.  And  in  the  phraseology  of 
all  these  sonnets,  in  the  (neglected)  Song  beginning: 

All  suddenly  the  wind  comes  soft. 

And  Spring  is  here  again; 
And  the  hawthorn  quickens  with  buds  of  green. 
And  my  heart  with  buds  of  pain^ 

and,  Indeed,  in  all  the  later  poems,  there  Is  a  large, 
assured  simplicity  of  language,  whatever  Is  being 
said,  that  is  peculiar  to  poets  of  the  first  order.  His 
style  reached  full  maturity  in  those  fragments  which 
Mr.  Marsh  appended  to  his  Memoir,  particularly 
the  scattered  lines  from  an  unwritten  poem  on  the 
approach  of  the  Fleet  to  the  Troad,  lines  like  that  in 
which  the  ghost  of  the  Greek  past  hears  "  more  than 
Olympian  thunder  on  the  sea  "  and  that  in  which 
Achilles,  aware  of  the  great  events  impending, 
"  moved  the  great  shades  that  were  his  limbs." 

There  is  little  of  his  best;  but  what  there  is  of  it 
could  not  be  better.  And  it  is  worth  remarking  that 
the  more  he  developed,  the  more  lucid  he  became. 
There  exists  at  present  among  most  of  our  semi-good 
260 


Rupert  Brooke  in  Retrospect 

poets  (and  not  all  our  good  ones  are  always  free 
from  it)  a  habit  of  writing  in  dark  abracadabras 
which  it  is  difficult  to  fathom.  Profound  thoughts 
and  recondite  images  cannot  always  be  fully  grasped 
at  first  reading,  and  most  good  literature  makes 
some  demands  upon  the  intelligence  of  the  reader. 
But  I  think  it  may  be  postulated  that,  however  mul- 
tiple and  deep  may  be  the  meanings  of  a  poem  or  a 
phrase,  it  is  the  characteristic  of  all  the  greatest 
poetry  that  a  surface  meaning  at  least  can  be  compre- 
hended at  sight.  Brooke,  in  this  regard,  was  a 
model;  at  the  time  of  his  death  he  was,  without  fore- 
going any  thought  that  he  wanted  to  express,  the 
simplest  and  clearest  of  good  English  writers;  he 
used  no  word  and  no  construction  that  was  beyond 
the  range  of  intelligent  English  conversation.  With 
such  a  personality,  such  a  brain,  and  such  a  command 
over  words  and  their  order,  he  might,  had  he  lived, 
have  produced  a  body  of  work  which  would  have 
stood  beside  that  of  Keats. 


261 


Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  Idyll 

THERE  is  no  law  under  which  authors  can  be 
punished  for  insufficient  output.  If  there 
were,  Mr.  Max  Beerbohm  would  have  a 
thin  time.  Since  he  left  off  writing  dramatic  criti- 
cisms for  the  Saturday  Review  he  seems  to  have  con- 
tracted the  idea  that  a  small  book  once  in  five  years, 
and  a  short  article  or  story  once  in  two  years,  satis- 
factorily represent  the  extent  of  his  duty  to  society. 
He  does  an  occasional  cartoon  as  well,  and  we  should 
be  grateful  for  that;  but  it  is  absurd  that  if  one  wants 
to  say  anything  about  him  one  should  be  driven  to 
write  about  his  old  books.  For  he  is  one  of  the  best 
parodists,  essayists  and  critics  alive,  and  every  day 
scores  of  thoughts  must  go  flitting  across  his  mind 
which  would  be  both  salutary  and  enlivening  to  us  if 
only  he  were  not  so  unpardonably  idle. 

Mr.  John  Lane,  possibly  in  despair  about  getting 
anything  new  out  of  him,  has  reprinted  expensively 
with  dexterous  illustrations  by  George  Sheringham, 
The  Happy  Hypocrite,  one  of  Mr.  Beerbohm's 
earliest  "  works."  It  looks  odd  in  a  large  volume 
with  illustrations  and  a  herbaceous  cover;  it  is  the 
sort  of  story  that  should  be  printed  in  a  format  small 
and  choice.  But  even  if  it  were  got  up  like  a  Blue- 
262 


Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  Idyll 

Book  or  a  Family  Bible  it  would  be  welcome.  It 
cannot  be  defined.  It  is  a  silly  short  story,  a  mad 
parable,  a  grotesque  fairy  tale,  a  ferocious  burlesque, 
a  fantastic  pastiche.  It  reads  as  well  now  as  it  did 
in  the  'nineties;  and  as  well  on  tenth  reading  (judi- 
cious intervals  allowed)  as  on  first. 

How  could  man  open  better  than  this: 

"  None,  it  is  said,  of  all  who  revelled  with  the 
Regent,  was  half  so  wicked  as  Lord  George  Hell.  I 
will  not  trouble  my  little  readers  with  a  long  recital 
of  his  great  naughtiness.  But  it  were  well  they 
should  know  that  he  was  greedy,  destructive,  and 
disobedient.  I  am  afraid  there  is  no  doubt  that  he 
often  sat  up  at  Carlton  House  until  long  after  bed- 
time, playing  at  games,  and  that  he  generally  ate  and 
drank  far  more  than  was  good  for  him.  His  fond- 
ness for  fine  clothes  was  such  that  he  used  to  dress 
on  week-days  quite  as  gorgeously  as  good  people 
dress  on  Sundays.  He  was  thirty-five  years  old  and 
a  great  grief  to  his  parents." 

He  was  candid,  and  some  maintained  that  his  can- 
dour was  a  redeeming  virtue : 

"  But,  painful  as  it  is  to  me  to  dissent  from  any 
opinion  expressed  by  one  who  is  now  dead,  I  hold 
that  Candour  is  good  only  when  it  reveals  good  ac- 
tions or  good  sentiments,  and  that  when  it  reveals 
evil,  itself  is  evil,  even  also." 

263 


Books  in  General 

That  last,  touch  of  preposterous  and  tautologous 
pomposity  is  characteristic. 

The  vein,  for  a  while,  is  kept  up: 

"  It  is  pleasant  to  record  that  many  persons  were 
inobnoxious  to  the  magic  of  his  title  and  disapproved 
of  him  so  strongly  that,  whenever  he  entered  a  room 
where  they  happened  to  be,  they  would  make  straight 
for  the  door  and  watch  him  very  severely  through  the 
keyhole." 

The  children  knew  him  as  King  Bogey. 

"  It  is  true  that  his  Lordship  was  a  non-smoker  — 
a  negative  virtue,  certainly,  and  due,  even  that,  I 
fear,  to  the  fashion  of  the  day  —  but  there  the  list  of 
his  good  qualities  comes  to  an  abrupt  conclusion. 
He  loved  with  an  insatiable  love  the  town  and  the 
pleasures  of  the  town,  whilst  the  ennobling  influences 
of  our  English  lakes  were  quite  unknown  to  him. 
He  used  to  boast  that  he  had  not  seen  a  buttercup 
for  twenty  years.  .  .  ." 

"  No  card-player  in  St.  James's  cheated  more  per- 
sistently than  he.  As  he  was  rich  and  had  no  wife 
and  family  to  support,  I  can  offer  no  excuse  for  his 
conduct."  He  would  royster  nightly  at  Garble's, 
with  a  dancer  on  his  arm,  "  clad  in  Georgian  cos- 
tume, which  was  not  then,  of  course,  fancy  dress,  as 
it  is  now."  But  love  and  Miss  Mere  came;  Lord 
264 


Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  Idyll 

George  was  smitten  at  sight,  sought  the  Fair  behind 
the  scenes,  and  fell  on  his  knees  before  her  "  with 
a  loud  crash." 

I  will  not  detail  the  process  which  transformed 
Lord  George  Hell  into  Lord  George  Heaven:  how 
he  bought  the  beautiful  and  saintly  mask  to  hide  his 
degraded  face;  how  his  face  changed;  how,  at  the 
pastrycook's,  he  said:  "  Which  are  buns,  Jenny;  I 
should  like  to  have  one,  too  " ;  how  "  they  were  mar- 
ried according  to  the  simple  rites  of  a  dear  little  reg- 
istry office  in  Covent  Garden  ";  how  they  hid  from 
the  world;  how  they  celebrated  the  mensiversary  of 
their  wedding;  and  how  they  surmounted  the  last 
trial.  The  most  remarkable  thing  to  be  noted,  in  my 
opinion,  is  the  way  in  which  Mr.  Beerbohm,  in  the 
face  of  all  his  self-imposed  difficulties,  keeps  one  in- 
terested in  his  indescribably  impossible  characters, 
and  makes  one  wish,  as  one  should  always  wish,  for 
a  happy  ending;  and  the  effect  he  produces  of  having 
written  a  tale  not  farcical  but  beautiful. 

The  nearest  thing  to  it  that  exists  is  its  contem- 
porary. Lord  Arthur  Savile's  Crime,  that  attractive 
story  in  which  murder  is  treated  as  a  thing  which  at 
best  may  be  a  duty,  and  at  worst  an  extravagant  but 
rather  charming  caprice.  But  that  book  lacks  the 
peculiar  fragrance  of  Mr.  Beerbohm's.  The  era 
from  which  it  sprang  was  one  in  which  the  common- 
est cliches  were  the  cliches  of  Arcadia.  Poets  wrote 
lines  on  the  model  of  "  the  viol,  the  violet,  and  the 

265 


Books  in  General 

vine";  and,  what  is  odder,  were  praised  for  them. 
Pierrot  and  Cokimbine  were  driven  very  hard;  the 
scenes  of  Watteau,  usually  viewed  through  the  eyes 
of  Verlaine,  were  everywhere  reproduced.  Leaden 
Cupids,  on  pedestals  by  sobbing  fountains,  watched 
fantastic  lovers  kissing  in  the  moon;  fauns  lamented 
their  misfortunes  on  their  pipes;  the  jeunesse  pou- 
dree,  with  a  deplorable  lack  of  humour,  sighed  for 
Dresden  shepherdesses  and  strawberries,  for  simplic- 
ity chapleted  with  roses;  dandyisms  and  delicacies 
were  accumulated  from  all  the  centuries,  from  Theo- 
critus to  Petronlus,  from  Ronsard  to  Brummel  and 
d'Orsay.  It  all  falls  very  flat  now;  and  one  of  the 
reasons  is  that  it  was  only  half,  If  half,  meant,  but 
was  not  said  as  though  It  were  half  meant;  and  the 
reaction  against  the  cult  has  been  so  great  that  most 
modern  writers  are  thoroughly  afraid  to  use  such  a 
word  as  "  roses."  But,  queerly,  Mr.  Beerbohm,  the 
one  man  who  treated  the  whole  convention  flippantly 
and  used  Its  stock  materials  as  a  parodist,  succeeds 
In  doing  something  permanently  delightful  with 
them.  A  man  who  cannot  contemplate  without 
boredom  the  weary  prettlness  of  Dowson  or  the 
gluttonous  philanderings  of  Richard  le  Gallienne, 
can  find  Mr.  Beerbohm's  Arcadianisms,  In  spite  of  — 
or  rather  because  of  —  their  ridiculous  setting, 
charming  and  even  touching  in  themselves.  It  Is  not 
altogether  In  mockery  that  he  uses  his  porcelain 
words.  As  he  does  not  believe  that  making  decora- 
tions Is  the  chief  object  of  life,  or  attempt  to  pile  on 
them  a  load  which  they  cannot  carry,  he  captivates 
266 


Mr.  Max  Beerbohm's  Idyll 

us,  and  I  think  himself,  with  them.  He  brings  out 
all  the  stock  properties  with  a  wicked  smile ;  but  au- 
thor and  reader  both  end  by  saying:  "  But  these 
things  are  rather  delicious  after  all."  What  we  are 
not  asked  to  believe  we  believe.  The  grotesque 
menage  in  St.  James's  Park,  the  pure  and  simple 
open-air  amour,  the  repasts  of  seed-cake  and  dew- 
berry wine,  the  fresh,  bird-haunted  dawns,  the  wild 
flowers  and  the  ribbons,  and  the  aged  woodman  who 
walked  the  woods  by  the  Ken  with  faggots  on  his 
back:  they  are  made  credible  because  they  are  de- 
scribed in  jest,  and  I  at  least  always  find  the  adven- 
tures of  Lord  George  Hell  and  his  blushing  maid 
linger  in  the  memory  not  as  a  piece  of  wild  buffoon- 
ery but  as  a  scented  idyll. 


267 


Fire  and  the  Heart  of  Man 

IT  was  eleven  o'clock  at  night.  I  was  preparing 
to  write  an  essay.  I  was  going  to  write  it  about 
a  book.  The  book  was  a  good  and  a  beautiful 
book;  it  filled  me  with  the  noblest  thoughts,  made  me 
a  better  man  and  fit  for  the  most  heroic  actions.  It 
was  full  of  sagacity,  of  sound  reasoning,  of  imagina- 
tion checked  by  sense,  of  reflection  shot  through 
with  vision.  It  was  not  only  a  good  book,  but  a 
large  and  solid  book,  a  book  to  be  chewed  like  the 
cud,  remembered  and  returned  to,  a  virtuous  and 
courageous  book,  a  book  of  mettle,  a  book  of  weight. 
Unfortunately,  or  fortunately,  just  as  I  had  finished 
reading  the  book  and  was  biting  the  end  of  my  foun- 
tain-pen, wondering  how  in  God's  name  I  was  to  do 
it  justice,  I  looked  out  of  my  attic  window.  The 
trees  stood  dark  across  the  road;  the  river  lay  dark 
beyond  the  trees;  but  the  light  of  the  stars  was  not 
the  only  light.  On  the  horizon,  behind  some  trees 
and  a  house,  glowing,  reddening,  rolling,  there  was 
a  Fire. 

There  may  be  people  who,  when  they  see  Fire  in 
the  distance,  say,  "Oh,  what  a  pity!  I  hope  the 
Insurance  Company  will  not  suffer  heavily";  or, 
"  What  a  waste  of  material!  "  There  may  be  peo- 
ple who  say,  "  There  is  a  Fire  " —  and  then  go  to 
268 


Fire  and  the  Heart  of  Man 

bed.  There  may  even  be  people  who  say,  "  Well, 
what  if  there  is  a  Fire?  " —  and  turn  grumpily  to  re- 
sume their  discussion  about  the  Ethics  of  Palaeontol- 
ogy or  the  Finances  of  a  Co-operative  Kitchen.  If 
such  people  exist,  I  am  not  among  them.  When  I 
saw  this  Fire  I  ran  downstairs  as  hard  as  I  could  pelt 
and  knocked  up  a  neighbour.  I  said  to  him,  "  There 
is  a  Fire.  Look!  "  He  answered,  "  By  Jove!  so 
there  is."  I  said,  "  It  may  be  twenty  miles  away  or 
two  miles  away.  The  farther  the  bigger.  If  it  is 
a  long  walk  the  compensation  is  proportionate." 
He  said,  "  Wait  a  minute  till  I  put  on  my  boots." 
I  said,  "  All  right;  but  buck  up  or  the  Fire  may  die 
down."  He  hurried;  and  we  started  walking.  We 
did  not  know  whither  we  were  walking.  All  we 
knew  was,  and  this  thought  slightly  depressed  us, 
that  the  direction  of  the  Fire  put  out  of  the  question 
any  hope  that  it  was  the  Albert  Memorial  or  the 
Queen  Victoria  Memorial  that  was  in  process  of  com- 
bustion. 

We  walked  along  the  river,  past  the  terrace  and 
the  cocoa-butter  factory,  and  the  nuns'  school,  and 
the  creek,  and  the  boathouses.  The  glare  increased 
steadily  as  we  went.  When  we  reached  the  bridge 
it  was  in  full  view.  An  enormous  factory  was  blaz- 
ing away  on  the  edge  of  the  river  below  the  bridge; 
the  great  span  cut  dark  across  the  flames  and  the 
glow.  As  we  climbed  to  the  bridge  we  saw  that 
there  was  a  thin  row  of  silent  people  leaning  over 
the    ironwork  —  looking    at    the    Fire.     The    stars 

269 


Books  in  General 

were  above  them  and  the  velvet  dark  sky;  the  river 
flowed  below  them;  a  few  hundred  yards  away  great 
flames  and  Intervolved  clouds  of  smoke  poured  out 
of  a  huge  building,  the  top  windows  of  which  were 
almost  Intolerably  bright.  The  roof  had  gone  and 
the  pillars  of  stonework  between  the  windows  looked 
like  the  pillars  of  some  ruined  Greek  temple  against 
a  magnificent  gold  sunset.  It  was  all  gold  and  blue; 
the  moving  gold  and  the  still,  all-embracing  blue; 
and  the  crowd  said  nothing  at  all.  There  was  no 
sound  except  when  a  great  stretch  of  masonry  fell 
in,  and  then  there  was  a  swelling  sigh  like  that  which 
greets  the  ascent  of  a  rocket  at  a  firework  display. 
There  was  a  wind,  and  it  was  chill;  we  passed  on 
over  the  bridge  and  descended  to  the  tow-path  on  the 
opposite  bank.  Along  that  path  we  went  until  we 
were  opposite  the  Fire.  About  eight  people,  very 
indistinct  In  the  gloom,  were  scattered  amongst  the 
waterside  bushes.  In  front  of  us  a  fire-boat  took  up 
its  position.  Below  and  around  the  Fire  little  lights 
flashed;  there  were  lights  above  the  river  (which  was 
at  low  tide)  ;  voices  shouted  terrifically  from  the 
other  bank;  voices,  addressed  to  'Arry,  answered 
from  the  boat,  and  made  reference  to  a  line.  An  en- 
gine began  working;  hoses  could  be  seen  sending 
rising  and  falling  sprays  of  water  against  a  blaze 
that  seemed  capable  of  defying  all  the  water  In  all 
the  seas. 

There  we  stood,  watching.  Only  one  sentence 
did  we  hear  from  our  awed  neighbours.  There  was 
270 


Fire  and  the  Heart  of  Man 

a  man  who  in  the  darkness  looked  portly  and  mous- 
tached.  He  took  his  pipe  out  of  his  mouth  and  said, 
optimistically,  "Nice  breeze;  it  ought  to  fan  it 
along."  "  Along  "  meant  an  enormous  oil  ware- 
house and  wharf.  Overhearing  that  remark,  I  told 
myself  the  truth.  The  moral  man  in  me,  the  citizen, 
the  patriot,  were  all  fighting  hard  for  supremacy.  I 
was  trying  to  say  to  myself:  "  This  may  mean  ruin 
to  somebody;  you  ought  to  pray  that  it  should  be  got 
under  at  once  ";  and  "  How  can  you  bear  to  see  so 
much  painfully-won  material  wastefully  consumed?  " 
and  "  This  stuff  would  probably  be  useful  at  the 
Front;  it  has  employed  labour;  its  loss  may  be  seri- 
ous; its  replacement  may  be  difficult;  Germany,  Ger- 
many, Germany,  Germany.  .  .  ."  But  all  that  com- 
pany of  virtuous  selves  fought  a  losing  battle. 
Aloud  or  in  quietness  I  (or  they)  could  say  all  this 
and  much  more;  but  the  still,  small  voice  kept  on  re- 
peating, "  Don't  you  be  a  humbug.  It's  no  good. 
You  want  this  Fire  to  spread.  You  want  to  forget 
what  it  all  means.  You  will  be  disappointed  if  the 
firemen  get  it  under.  You  would  like  to  see  the  next 
place  catch  fire,  and  the  next  place,  and  the  next 
place,  for  it  would  be  a  devil  of  a  great  display." 
Peccavi;  that  was  certainly  so. 

They  got  it  under.  They  cornered  it.  Flames 
gave  way  to  a  great  smoke;  the  smoke  grew  and 
grew;  the  path  and  the  bushes  faded  from  red  into 
the  indistinct  hue  of  the  starlit  night.  The  mental 
glow   died    down;   we    felt   cold,    and   moved,    and 

271 


Books  in  General 

walked  towards  home.  And  as  we  walked  I  medi- 
tated on  the  glory  of  Fire,  fit  subject  for  a  poet,  re- 
freshment for  the  human  spirit  and  exaltation  for 
the  soul.  My  emotions,  when  looking  at  it,  had  not 
been  entirely  base;  I  had  felt,  not  merely  a  sensuous 
pleasure  in  the  glories  of  that  golden  eruption  under 
the  blue  roof  of  night,  but  wonder  at  the  energies  we 
keep  under,  their  perpetuity  and  their  source,  and 
the  grandeur  of  man,  living  amid  so  much  vastness 
and  power,  valiantly  struggling  to  cope  with  things 
greater  than  himself,  save  that  they  have  no  souls. 
And  I  thought  that  in  the  perfect  and  hygienic  State 
where  the  firemen  would  find  water,  water,  every- 
where, where  the  Super-Hose  would  be  in  use,  where 
everything  would  be  built  of  fireproof  materials,  and 
where  extinguishers  of  a  capacity  not  conceived  by  us 
would  be  available  as  a  last  resort,  the  wise  sover- 
eign would  set  apart  beautiful  large  buildings,  all 
made  of  timber,  filled  with  oil,  tar  and  sugar,  sur- 
rounded with  waste  land  and  fronted  by  a  wide  re- 
flecting river,  which  would  periodically  be  set  on  fire 
for  the(  consolation  and  the  uplifting  of  men.  I 
don't  want  a  big  Fire  made  impossible. 

And  I  wondered  why  it  was  that  fire  on  a  huge 
scale  had  never  yet  adequately  inspired  a  poet.  And 
then  I  thought  that  poets  had,  after  all,  done  as  yet 
very  little,  considering  the  materials  that  are  daily 
displayed  before  them;  and  then  I  found  great  com- 
fort and  courage  in  the  thought  that  the  common- 
place things,  the  things  we  all  see  and  know,  live  by 
272 


Fire  and  the  Heart  of  Man 

and  live  with,  have  so  far  merely  been  skirted,  and 
that  the  provinces  which  remain  to  be  explored  and 
described  and  celebrated  by  imaginative  writers  are 
endless,  and  that  only  corners  have  as  yet  been  spied 
into. 


THE    E.ND 


273 


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This  book  is  DUE  on  the  last  date  stamped  below 


4^ 


OCT  15  1947 
mi    ^^^^ 

0EC3  01950 
JAftI   ^8  1953 


•GcroaMnii 

m  i019S7 
JUND1188T 


Form  L-9-15m-2,'36 


UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

AT 

LOS  ANGELES 


I  mill  111  I  nil  iiiii  II  III  I  ilil  I  I  II J  liU  ill 

3  1158  01197  5942 


A  A      000  295  344    6 


!!!  ! 


